


The Singer

by PeaceHeather



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, incomplete/abandoned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-03-25
Updated: 2006-03-25
Packaged: 2019-02-02 18:04:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12731577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeaceHeather/pseuds/PeaceHeather
Summary: When SG-4 brings an extra passenger back from a routine mission, SG-1 must solve the mystery of her origins.





	The Singer

**Author's Note:**

> Note from the archivists: this story was originally archived at [The Alpha Gate](https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Alpha_Gate), a Stargate SG-1 archive, which began migration to the AO3 in 2017 when its hosting software, eFiction, was no longer receiving support. To preserve the archive, we began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in November 2017. We e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are this creator and it hasn't transferred to your AO3 account, please contact us using the e-mail address on [The Alpha Gate collection profile](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/thealphagate).
> 
> This is the only Stargate SG-1 fic I've posted that I actually want to lay claim to after all these years. :)

  
Author's notes: Um, none, unless Outside Characters really bug the heck out of you. Minor language, brief reference to female nudity.  


* * *

Dr. Daniel Jackson sat back from his work with a tired sigh. It was a lovely little jar, maybe six inches from mouth to pointed base, lovingly hand-painted in abstract curves with what were probably simple earth-based pigments. Possibly it had been used for offering libations as part of worship; perhaps, given the wear marks along the graceful, curving double handle, it had hung from a belt and was used to carry liquor, or medicine, or. . . something else. Hopefully, the pieces would fit back together properly and he'd have a beautiful artifact in his hands once more; unfortunately, the prospect did not fill Dr. Jackson with the sense of wonder that it usually did. Piecing together a shattered artifact was supposed to come with the territory when one was an archaeologist, but having the artifact shatter on the floor of one's office was not.

_Five thousand years this little jar survived underground; survived excavation from P3R-626 and a trip across the galaxy, and now, now, I get to number the shards, transfer them to the sand tray, and hope I can refit them. This is really not my day._

Everything had seemed to go wrong today for Dr. Jackson (Daniel to his friends, but he hadn't seen them yet, and "today" was apparently not even bothering to introduce itself before launching into random acts of hostility), beginning even before he had gotten out of bed that morning. First were the nightmares; while SG-1 had been blissfully free of missions-gone-wrong for about two months, this meant that his subconscious had decided it was now safe to bring out some of the less pleasant experiences to process and, eventually, purge. _Hm. Yes. "Eventually" being the operative term, of course._ While nightmares and Daniel Jackson were old acquaintances, these had been worse than usual: vivid, recurring, waking him repeatedly, only to drag him back into their depths as soon as he let himself fall back asleep.

Bleary-eyed from a rotten night's sleep, he'd spilled coffee down the front of the first shirt he'd put on, and had wound up arriving late to Cheyenne Mountain because he'd tried to clean it off rather than simply changing into something else. It wasn't until after he arrived and couldn't understand what the airman at the gate said to him that he realized he was thinking, and had been dreaming, in Arabic, the language of his earliest childhood; switching completely to English had taken the better part of two hours and an entire pot of coffee.

Then there were the books that some bozo in Anthropology had misfiled on the shelf after returning them; all right, granted, they were returned a week ago, and ahead of schedule at that, and he hadn't needed them until today. Also granted, if he'd been thinking in English he probably would have spotted the titles within seconds, but he'd only been halfway through the pot of coffee at that point. As it was, he'd spent an hour looking for them, on the Cultures shelf where they should have been, on his desk, behind and under his couch; and had no sooner completed and sent the blistering email demanding that the books be returned immediately, when he'd spotted them - on the Linguistics shelf. The apology email was quickly sent, _but knowing Anders, he'll probably ignore it in favor of nursing his affronted dignity for a few days or so._

Recognizing the need for a break, he'd tried to head to the gym, thinking that maybe exercise would get the blood flowing - and had stopped dead in his tracks when Sha're had hurried past him in the corridor. A second glance showed a lab tech in a green coverall, her dark hair still loose and damp from the locker room showers, but otherwise looking nothing like his beloved, dead, wife.

Giving up on the workout, he'd hiked the stairs back to his office, bumped his desk sitting down, and a haphazard pile of paperwork had shifted, tumbling the little jar onto the floor. So here he was, huddled like a toddler with his toys, right in the middle of his office. The latex gloves itched, the lighting was abysmal, and his mood grew darker with each shard, painstakingly numbered and settled carefully into the little plastic tray by his knee. Filled about halfway with sand, it would keep the pieces from shifting their positions relative to each other, _as long as I don't suddenly develop an allergic reaction, sneeze, and send the entire setup flying._ He sighed. _I am too young to feel this old, and too old to feel this petulant._

The door opened partway, then bumped against his ankle. "Yo, Daniel! Ya decent?" Colonel Jonathan "Jack" O'Neill, wisecracking head of Dr. Jackson' s team and second-in-command at the Cheyenne Mountain facility, stuck his head into the opening to see what the obstruction was.

"If I said 'no', would it stop you?" Daniel replied, looking up. It would be just his luck to see O'Neill laughing at him, in addition to everything else that had happened so far today.

"Hell, no, and you should know better than to ask by now." O'Neill tilted his head for a better view of Daniel's patch of floor space. "Don't you get enough of that off-world? And would you mind moving your leg?"

"First," Daniel said, his eyes back on the shard in his hand, "'hell no, you should know better than to ask,' yourself; second, my leg isn't going anywhere until the last of these shards is off the floor and into the sand tray."

"Yeah, well, lunch for normal people was an hour and a half ago. You and Carter not being normal, I thought I'd better come by and make sure you each got something into your system besides coffee, or whatever Carter survives on when she's doing the lab maniac thing."

Daniel placed the shard he was working on, and carefully collected the next one from the tile floor. "Yes, well, I'm sure normal people also endure the occasional random collection of misanthropic misadventures, after which retreating home for lunch and deciding to remain there to avoid yet more cosmic hostility becomes a viable coping mechanism." He numbered the piece, tried to remember how it had been oriented, and placed it into the tray. _Only three more to go._

"Daniel?"

"Hmm?"

"English?"

"Oh, but Jack, I was hoping if I used enough big words you'd go away so I could finish this." He leaned one arm onto his leg, used his other hand to push his glasses up, and looked again at the man who was a constant thorn in his side - in Daniel's opinion, being his closest friend as well didn't necessarily let Jack off the hook when Daniel wanted to be left alone.

O'Neill tried to hide his smirk. "Oh, but Daniel, if I went away I'd miss out on the fun of annoying you." His expression gentled a bit. "Bad day?"

"Hellish. I'd love to catch a late lunch with you and Sam, really, but right now all I want is to get these shards, which until," he glanced at his watch, "forty-six minutes ago were a beautiful and pristine little vessel, numbered and transferred before I go home. And stay home. I meant what I said about cosmic hostility - I mean, I'm not superstitious, but do you ever get the feeling that an entire day is out to get you?"

Jack shifted against the doorframe and grinned. "Sure. Day I met you. . . day I met Carter. . . both those were in a good way, though. . . every damn time we found out Apophis wasn't dead, again. . ." He chuckled. "That's the last piece, right? You sure about lunch?"

Daniel stood, gently lifted the tray to a safe spot, and began peeling off the latex gloves. "I'm sure. I've got some translations I can take home to work on, so the day won't be a complete waste; and before you say it, I know the artifacts stay here. I have several pages of notes I need to transcribe into something you 'normal people' can read, from - "

Just then the klaxons began to sound: Incoming wormhole. Daniel turned wide, outraged eyes to the colonel.

"Hey, hey, hey, don't look at me! I think we both should have seen that one coming."

In order to avoid a "foothold situation", base policy had recently changed; all exits were now locked down, from the time a wormhole engaged until the incoming team cleared post-mission checks in the infirmary. Lockdown, of course, meant no one got in or out of the mountain. _Perfect,_ Daniel thought. _Just perfect._

"Cosmic hostility," he muttered.

Jack nodded sagely and replied, "Just in time for lunch."

* * *

As always, the control room for the Stargate leapt into activity accompanied by flashing lights and the sound of the alarm klaxons. Major General George Hammond could hear the Security Force troops taking up position in the gate room below, overlaid with officers' orders and weapons being primed to fire. In the control room, the clipped reports from the technicians came almost simultaneously, "Receiving iris code; it's SG-4, sir!" and "Receiving MALP transmission!"

At Hammond's gesture, a technician activated a nearby monitor, and with a flare of static, the broadcast began.

". . . is Lieutenant Reyes reporting in for SG-4; do you copy?"

Hammond glanced at his technicians, and could see the unspoken question on all their faces. SG-4 was on a twenty-four-hour mission, not expected to report at all, and not due to return for about eighteen hours. With a frown, he leaned forward and spoke into the microphone.

"This is Hammond; go ahead, Lieutenant."

"Yes sir." Reyes' hair was spiky and damp, and sweat trickled down one side of his face. "Captain Stefanopoulos sent me ahead to notify you; there's been a development with the people who live here, and we'll be headed back early. The Captain said to request a medical team in the gate room and to tell you we've got an extra passenger coming with us."

Hammond suppressed the flash of alarm at the lieutenant's words. "Goa'uld, Lieutenant?"

Reyes' eyes grew wide. "Uh, no sir! Sorry, sir. I'm trying to keep it short - the Captain and the rest of the team will be here in a minute. Uh, we hiked in and made contact. The people who live here are aliens, sir, but they had a person, I mean, a human, that they were holding prisoner. At least, that's what it looked like, sir. The aliens demanded that we leave and take the prisoner with us. Wouldn't take 'no' for an answer. Steffo, uh, I mean Captain Stefanopoulos, took one look and had us start rigging a field stretcher. We hiked out together, and when we got in sight of the Gate, he sent me on ahead."

The Lieutenant wiped his forehead with the back of a hand, looked over his shoulder again, and continued, "They're coming down the hill now. I don't know how bad she's hurt, sir, but she wasn't walking on her own. The Captain thought she might be sick, too - said it would be a good idea to clear out the gate room, just in case she's contagious. Uh, this may be crude, sir, but - the way she smells, I think the Captain's got the right idea."

With that, the rest of SG-4 came into view behind Reyes on the monitor, two of them carrying a high-sided stretcher between them while the others kept their weapons at ready.

"Lieutenant Reyes, inform SG-4 that you will be clear to arrive in two minutes."

"Yes sir. Did you need to speak with the Captain, sir? He's here now."

"Negative, Lieutenant. You've given us what we need for now; debrief can wait. Hammond out."

"Yes sir. Reyes out."

As the monitor returned to static, Hammond nodded to Sergeant Davis and moved to the spiral staircase that led to the gate room itself. He listened as the call for a medical team sounded over the public address speakers, and again as Davis announced the "biohazard protocol" code to the troops waiting below. The security forces responded to Davis' instruction immediately, half their number falling back to positions outside the blast doors, and half moving behind the permanent weapon emplacements.

By the time the general reached the foot of the stairs, the iris was open, and the remaining SFs were drawing biohazard hoods over their faces. Medical personnel had already arrived, wheeling a gurney and portable monitoring instruments to the foot of the ramp. As they completed their setup, SG-4 stepped through the Stargate, moved down the ramp, and placed the field stretcher directly onto the gurney with purposeful efficiency.

A slim form lay motionless inside, arms crossed limply across the ribcage and held in place with light straps. From his vantage point, General Hammond could make out bare feet, ragged clothing, a suggestion of breasts, and matted, dread-locked hair that might be any length past the jaw line. Drying mud obscured almost all other details; below the knee, it was difficult to tell where clothing ended and skin began. Even her hair was partially caked with it. The woman's cleanest features were her forearms and hands, where the straps from the stretcher had chafed away the excess but left her skin gray, and her face, which was likewise gray where it was visible under an SG-issue bandanna folded across her forehead and eyes. Her head lolled to one side, mouth slack. As she was lifted into place, Hammond caught a glint of silver at her throat.

The wormhole winked out of existence as Hammond stepped closer. SG-4 stood in a tight cluster at the foot of the ramp; two medics, gloved and masked, checked the woman's vital signs and secured the field stretcher to the gurney, while a third issued instructions, gesturing toward the SF's who began to file out of the gate room.

"Medic, report."

The third medic turned and looked down at him, a giant of a man with a rumbling bass voice. "Sir, on Dr. Fraiser's orders, the corridor between here and the infirmary has been evacuated, and a biohazard crew is prepping to scrub the gate room. We're to take SG-4 with us, and all their equipment, until we can be certain that any disease the patient might be carrying won't spread. The SF's are being sent ahead since they represent the least risk to the rest of the base." The medic paused, and frowned uneasily.

"I gather that there's more to tell me."

"Yes, sir. Dr. Fraiser also wanted me to tell you that it would best for her to report to you over the phone rather than in person, since she will be unable to leave the infirmary herself until she determines the risk of exposure to the rest of the base. Unfortunately, sir, she also ordered me to bring everyone present in the gate room to the infirmary with me. Sir -"

"Everyone. You're saying I'm under quarantine as well."

"Yes, sir, I'm afraid so. I'm sorry, sir." Behind him, SG-4, the medical team, and their patient were making their way out of the gate room.

"I understand. Shouldn't you be with them, Doctor. . .?"

"Captain, sir. Captain Eric Gustav, sir," the giant replied, taking a deep breath before continuing. "Dr. Fraiser's orders were to be certain that everyone heading to the infirmary travel with an escort, as a precaution, sir." Captain Gustav had the look of a man who knew his duty, but was not looking forward to being the bearer of any more unpleasant news.

Hammond only nodded. There was only one case in which a Major could issue orders to a General and expect to be obeyed, and that was when the Major was also Chief Medical Officer of the entire facility. Doctor Fraiser had saved many of the lives under Hammond's command - a few of them on more than one occasion - and he was fully prepared to trust her judgment.

"This will only take a moment, Captain." He turned and looked up through the control room window. Sergeant Davis waited expectantly. "The current situation with SG-4 requires my presence in the infirmary for an unknown length of time. Have my personal aide locate Colonel O' Neill, and relay to him the following report in person." Hammond recited a brief summary of the events that had just taken place. "Under no circumstances is he to come to the infirmary, nor is any member of SG-1 to do so before quarantine is lifted, unless Colonel O'Neill so orders. I'm granting O'Neill full authority to access any records and reports he may need to investigate SG-4's recent mission, including the files in my office. Is that understood?"

Sergeant Davis leaned toward the microphone. "Yes, sir. Captain Bryant is here, sir."

Sure enough, his aide appeared at the console next to Davis, apparently writing notes at top speed in the little pad he kept with him. "Good. Bryant, once you have relayed that report, you can consider yourself reassigned as the colonel's personal aide until such time as I am released from Dr. Fraiser's care. My guess is that he won't set up shop in my office, although he is welcome to do so if he deems it necessary. You will, of course, extend to him every courtesy that you do to me."

"Yes, sir." Bryant swallowed, looking distinctly nervous.

"And if he makes life too difficult for you, you can tell him from me not to be such a wiseass just because he has the run of the base. "

"Sir?" It wasn't his imagination; Captain Bryant had, in fact, just squeaked.

"That last was a joke, Bryant." Hammond glanced at Captain Gustav, who appeared to be waiting relatively patiently, and biting back a smile more or less successfully. O'Neill's abrasive personality was legendary among the infirmary staff.

Hammond continued, "O'Neill has an intimidating reputation, but he's a fine commanding officer. You can trust him to keep you busy, and to expect your best effort from you; however, he won't make your life a living hell, no matter what the rumors tell you, unless you're lazy or incompetent, and then God help you, son. If I thought you were either one, you wouldn't have been assigned to me, much less to my second-in-command. Do I make myself clear?"

Whether it was having a notepad to fidget with, or Hammond's speech, the freckled young man seemed to relax. At least this time he smiled when he said, "Yes sir." He seemed to struggle for words for a moment, then cautiously spoke into the microphone.

"Permission to tell Colonel O'Neill not to be such a wiseass, if I deem it necessary, sir?"

Hammond noticed the grin his aide was struggling, and failing, to hide, and shook his head at him. "Don't push your luck, son. Now get out of here." Bryant snapped to attention, pivoted on his heel, and left; Hammond fell into step beside Captain Gustav, grateful that the control room window muffled his answering chuckle.

* * *

Hammond arrived to find the infirmary in the midst of controlled chaos. Security Forces troops were sitting three to a bed halfway between the entrance and the far wall, while masked and gloved orderlies moved among them, preparing to take blood. More orderlies had shifted long-term patients to beds behind the SF's, and had just finished adjusting the isolation curtains between the two groups. The members of SG-4 were following a doctor and two more orderlies into one isolation room, packs and weapons in tow. Cloth masks, in some cases full surgical hoods, and latex gloves were everywhere.

The door to the second isolation unit was already closed. Through the window, Hammond could see a swarm of medical personnel who surrounded the gurney holding the infirmary's newest resident, somehow managing not to trip over one another in the complex dance of healing. Along with the constant motion, Hammond could hear voices overlapping one another as they tended to their patient's needs.

"Pupils responsive to stimuli." "Temperature?" "One-oh-four point nine and dropping." "Pulse one-oh-three, BP eighty-eight over fifty." "Where are those cold packs?" "Doctor, I can't find a vein -" "Try one of her legs, she needs fluids now." "Cold packs, Doctor." "Armpits, abdomen, groin, back of the neck, which reminds me, did anyone check for -" "Respiration shallow and rapid." "Captain Stefanopoulos reported no scar, Doctor." "Good news. Temperature?" "One-oh-four point two and dropping." "That was fast. . . How 's that IV coming?" "Just got it, Doctor." "The rest of this can wait, let' s get her into the MRI."

With that cue, the huddle surrounding the gurney broke apart, and the entire ensemble began to move once again. General Hammond stepped back to allow the procession plenty of space; as they wheeled by, apparently without even looking up, Hammond caught only a glimpse of the woman, freed from the field stretcher but still filthy, nearly hidden beneath an assortment of wires, oxygen mask, chemical icepacks, and restraints. It looked as though Dr. Fraiser was taking no chances until she could be sure that the patient was not infested with a Goa'uld parasite, no matter how weak she appeared to be.

The wake from their passing carried a strong odor with it; something like stale sweat, something like the green mud at the edge of a lake, and something else, sour, that he couldn't quite place but that reminded him of the smell in a sickroom. Lieutenant Reyes had been right; it wasn't pleasant.

Dr. Fraiser's voice lifted above the murmur. "Good afternoon, General. If you could wait in my office, I should have a preliminary report for you shortly; also you're under quarantine as of now, I hope Gustav remembered to warn you. . ."

"He did, Doctor," Hammond answered her, just as the door to the MRI chamber swung closed between them. He looked about in bemusement. Normally, coming to the infirmary meant one of his own was in grave danger; visiting with his men, and women, was as good for him as it was for general morale. It seemed strange to be here now, with so few beds filled, and what patients there were nearly all fully clothed and calmly following the orderlies' instructions. A passing nurse handed him a surgical mask, murmuring something about precautions. Hammond tied it in place, found an out-of-the-way corner near Dr. Fraiser's office, and settled in to wait.

* * *

"I'm telling you, Danny, that fish was this big."

"Jack. What part of 'I Don't Want To Hear It' did you not understand?"

"Ah, you're just jealous 'cause you -"

"Excuse me. Um. Colonel O'Neill?"

O'Neill looked up to see a nervous, freckled airman standing before him, fidgeting with a notepad and apparently trying to decide whether or not to snap to attention and go all formal on him, now that he'd walked into the middle of a perfectly good fish story. _They get younger every year, so help me_ , he thought. "At ease, Captain. . .?"

"Bryant, sir. General Hammond's aide, sir."

"Captain Bryant. Thought you looked familiar. Hammond send for me?"

"Uh, not exactly, sir. He asked me to locate you and deliver this report. In person, sir."

O'Neill raised his eyebrows. "This ought to be good." Hammond didn't usually operate like this, Jack knew; if he needed to relay a confidential report, the general would call, or ask someone to collect him, and the two would confer in Hammond's office. If it weren't confidential, but still important, he would often locate O'Neill himself. _Kid still looks nervous, too. Something's definitely up._

Sliding his tray to one side, Jack tossed his napkin over the dubious substance masquerading as a casserole, and gave the young man his full attention. "Have a seat, Bryant. Give me the most important points first, then go back and tell it from the beginning."

Bryant blinked, turned his notepad over in his hands, and sat next to Dr. Jackson, opposite O'Neill.

"Um. General Hammond has placed you in command of the SGC, sir, and reassigned me as your aide, until he is released from the infirmary."

"What?" "What's wrong with him?"

"Uh, nothing, Dr. Jackson. It's kind of complicated."

"Captain? From the beginning would be good," O'Neill said, shooting Daniel a look that he hoped would be interpreted as, _'I need you as a second pair of ears, here'_ , and not, _'Don't interrupt, geek, this is military business.'_

"Yes, sir. The wormhole activation a few minutes ago was SG-4, returning early from their mission. . ." The aide quickly recited the events as Hammond had outlined them, eyes flicking to his notepad from time to time. So, the team had stepped back through the Gate with one more than they'd left with; it was tempting to make some quip about "leaving the aliens where we find them", but he suppressed it and focused his attention once more.

Hammond tended to meet his teams in person when they stepped through the gate, and always did so if there were unusual conditions surrounding their return. This time, unfortunately, it had landed him in quarantine. _Danny' ll be pissed when he realizes he's not getting out of here anytime soon. . ._

He realized that both Daniel and the young officer were looking at him expectantly.

"Well, all-righty, then. Bryant, locate any reports that we have on that planet and bring them to the briefing room. I probably have an overview on my desk somewhere; I want to get that and then I'll meet you there. Daniel, I'd like you with me on this; we should round up Carter and Teal'c, too. Any ideas?"

Daniel pushed his glasses up and pondered the question. "Oh. Well. You, or maybe Sam, might want to check out the MALP readings, see if there's anything unusual there."

"Good start. And?"

"And, if you don't mind, I'd like to take a look at the files as well; I thought this world was supposed to be inhabited by aliens, but Captain Bryant says they brought a human back with them."

"Nox, Tollan, some other look-alike alien?"

"Ah, could be; actually, I was thinking that there might be some kind of cultural blending between humans living on that planet and a native alien race, something that was overlooked in the initial reports. I might be able to uncover something, if I had a look at the raw data."

"Worth a shot. I'm going to want more info from SG-4; Bryant, once you get those files, call down to the infirmary and see if we can get a phone line into their CO's quarantine unit, or something. I can always call the Doc's office if I need to reach her or Hammond."

"Yes, sir. Anything else, sir?"

"Not yet. Dismissed." As Hammond's aide left the commissary, _no, my aide - for now,_ he reminded himself, O'Neill stood and picked up his tray, watching as Daniel tried to hurriedly finish his coffee. "Ah! Not you. I had breakfast this morning."

"Jack -"

"Just chill for a minute. It's going to take Bryant time to get all those files together, and I do need to get the overview from my office just to get some idea what I'm diving into, here. It will take more time to establish a phone line to, hmm, should still be Stefanopoulos on this one. Point is, you have time to finish your lunch without choking on it," he smirked, "and I'm going to need you well-fed. This could be a long night. You can go fish Carter out of her lab and meet me in the briefing room when you're done."

Ah. That seemed to mollify the scholar; Daniel must have thought Jack was trying to blow him off. He couldn't resist adding, "Take long enough, and we'll even have a full pot of coffee waiting for you. You like coffee, don't you?"

Daniel ducked his head, fighting a smile. "I suppose if I'm stuck on base until the all-clear, I may as well make myself useful."

"You're welcome." Jack squeezed his shoulder as he picked up his tray and headed out. "See you in a few."

* * *

The briefing room table, spacious enough to accommodate over a dozen officers and as much red tape as the Pentagon could generate, was as close to "cluttered" as Colonel O'Neill could remember seeing it. There were only a few file folders lying open in the center, their contents spread slightly; however, O'Neill's personal set of Wonder Twins were gleefully setting up shop, apparently more than ready to dive into the latest challenge he'd thrown at them, and the resultant scatter of material took up almost every open inch of space at either end of the table. Drs. Carter and Jackson might appear to the uninitiated to be calm, competent professionals, but O' Neill considered himself an expert on their behavior, and he wasn't fooled for a second. _Yep, they're gleeful, whether they'll admit it or not._

"Shape Of - A Lab Maniac!" O'Neill strode into the room, another folder tucked under one arm. Two heads emerged from their work simultaneously, wearing identical expressions of bewilderment. "Form Of - A Culture Nut!" He grinned and held his two fists together in imitation of the old cartoon. He was pleased to startle a chuckle from "Shape Of", also known as Major Sam Carter, who shook her head and ducked back down behind the table. "Form Of" simply rolled his eyes in annoyance, _as if it's my fault he never got to watch all the cool cartoons as a kid!_

"Someone would get the impression you two didn't have enough to do, or something," O'Neill continued, flopping his papers onto the table and moving toward the coffeepot.

The top of the "lab maniac's" head was barely visible as she nodded, not taking her eyes from the back of the portable VCR, workstation and monitor, her hands full of cable. "Just looking forward to a change of pace, sir." She twisted another jack into place. "Would you prefer that I start with the MALP video first, or the UAV, Daniel?"

The "culture nut" considered for a moment, pausing in the middle of unrolling several large, blank sheets of paper and weighing down the corners with his coffee mug, a stack of reports, and a generous collection of artist 's pencils.

"Well, the alien settlement isn't visible from the Stargate on this planet, so I thought the UAV data would be more useful for me; however, I was planning on going over the written data from both instruments first, so. . ."

"So I get to pick, huh?" Carter emerged from behind her equipment and smiled down the table.

Daniel's smile flickered briefly in return. "If you like."

The two scientists, friends from almost the moment they'd met, had over time developed a means of communicating with one another on what Jack liked to think of as their "secret evil twin frequency". It went beyond finishing one another's sentences (the entire team could do that, they fit together so well); a lift of eyebrows from one of them, a tilt of the other's head, and right under his nose volumes of information would be exchanged, indecipherable to anyone outside their "vibe". It made it difficult to be their commanding officer, sometimes, when they could exchange a look and he would just know that they were talking about him. Somehow. _And of course they always deny it, then turn around and do it again_ , he thought. _Just like this._

"Don't mind me, or anything," O'Neill put in. "It's pretty clear you two are having a 'moment' - I wouldn't want to interrupt."

"Okay, Jack."

"Okay?"

"Okay, I won't mind you. Oh, sorry, that should be 'okay, I'll try not to mind you,' since you do have something of a knack for, um, making yourself noticed."

"Ya know, Danny, that's probably the nicest thing you've ever said to me."

"No, it isn't, but you're welcome anyway. Try not to let it go to your head."

"Where's the fun in that?" Jack teased, and topped off Daniel's coffee mug. "Did you find Teal'c?"

Carter took a seat at the table, leaning forward to adjust the monitor settings. "Daniel and I went by his room, sir, but he wasn't in. I thought he might be down in the gym with the martial arts class, so we left him a note to join us once he's available."

"Guess that'll have to do. Whatcha got?" He sat down near Carter's end of the table, giving Daniel space to move about as the younger man began to sketch, alternating his frown of concentration between the drawing sheets and a sheaf of paper in his other hand.

"Well, sir, nothing yet; I'm going to start with the original MALP report that we received prior to SG-4's mission, and try to get a clear idea of what the planet is like. Then I want to compare that information with the data from today's MALP transmission, when Lieutenant Reyes called in." She held out one hand, palm up. "I'm looking for anything that might be out of the ordinary, but with an alien planet it's hard to know what qualifies as 'ordinary' to begin with."

O'Neill nodded. "Daniel's already given me an idea of what he's looking for and how he plans to go about it. Captain Bryant dug out these reports from Hammond's files, so I figure I get to be an extra pair of eyes for the time being." He leaned back in his chair and took a sip of coffee. "I'll be a lot happier once we can get a phone line established to Steffo, and get some kind of a debrief out of him and his team."

"Why isn't that possible now?"

"Because I can't send a bunch of tech-guys down there to set up the phone line without putting them under quarantine, too, which means they wouldn't get to come out to finish the job. So we get to wait until they call me." He scowled, and took another sip. "I hate waiting."

Carter nodded, only too familiar with the colonel's irritation when circumstances would not permit him to go and do. She favored him with a mostly sympathetic look, then popped in the first tape, settled a pair of headphones, and pushed the "play" button. Over her shoulder, Jack watched a series of slightly blurred images overlaid with the kind of scientific gibberish that, he knew, she could read like a second language. When he was sure she was engrossed in her work, he glanced surreptitiously at the other end of the table, and was relieved to note that Carter's fellow Wonder Twin was equally absorbed in the task at hand.

Assured that neither of them would notice, O'Neill carefully fished a pair of Ben Franklin-style reading glasses from his pocket, and began to scan the in-depth mission briefing.

* * *

For nearly an hour the three worked in relative silence, the quiet punctuated by the scratch of pen on rustling paper, the shift of a coffee mug, or Dr. Jackson's occasional, habitual murmurings to himself. Finally, Jack decided he'd exhausted his tolerance for report reading, tucked his glasses away, and stood to stretch.

"All right, kids, show and tell time. Who wants to go first?"

Carter pulled off her headphones as she and Jackson exchanged another of those looks, apparently deliberating; then the major began.

"The planet we're studying was designated P2X-357 in our initial listing of addresses from the cartouche room on Abydos. It's of interest to us mainly because finding the cartouche means that the Goa'uld knew of the existence of a Stargate on that planet. Initial MALP readings show an atmosphere almost identical to our own in composition, minus the pollutants of course. Radiation levels are typical for a sun similar to ours, magnetic field the same, and so on. The main difference is a slightly higher atmospheric pressure reading, which could indicate either a slightly larger planet, thus higher gravity, or one with shallower oceans and the heavier atmosphere that you would expect, if you were 'at sea level' and the sea level were lower compared to Earth's. Temperature and humidity levels would suggest that this is a jungle planet, but I'm not willing to make that assumption."

The colonel looked up in interest. "Why's that?"

Carter dropped her gaze to the headphones, lying on the table. "I once believed that we were stranded on an ice planet, sir, and it turned out to be Antarctica."

O'Neill gave a small shrug, and she went on. "I will say that the terrain surrounding the Stargate looks a lot like tropical rainforest, interspersed with open plains - heavy vegetation, warm temperatures, very high humidity. I'd even go so far as to suggest the Stargate itself is located near the planet's equator, because the extended readings indicate that day and night at that location are almost the same length."

"You get all that from the first MALP tape?"

"Most of it, yes, sir. The second tape, from today's transmission, is fairly consistent with the first; the air temperature was higher, and slightly less humid, but still probably pretty uncomfortable in heavy gear. No other significant changes that I could see."

"That's it? No naquadah or other fun minerals for you to play with?"

She shook her head. "Nothing obvious, sir. So far the MALP hasn't registered any seismic activity, so it's unlikely that there are any nearby fault lines - those are helpful, when we can get them, because any minerals present along the fault would be more visible to our instruments. The grasslands might be a result of different soil composition, which could indicate trace amounts or pockets of minerals that might interest us, but without physical samples from the sites, we can't be sure."

O'Neill nodded, and twirled his pen between his fingers. "Daniel?"

Daniel shuffled through the drawings he'd made; very few of the original sheets of paper were still blank. "I'm afraid I don't have a whole lot more information than Sam does - oh, hi, Teal'c."

Everyone looked up as the warrior walked into the room; he had a way of staking claim to an area simply by being in it, cloaked in the aloof dignity of his people. His team members, even after years working with him, still occasionally had to remind themselves not to be intimidated by his mere presence.

"It was not my intention to interrupt you, Daniel Jackson; please, continue."

"Oh, right - I used the transcripts from the UAV data to map the terrain surrounding the Stargate, to compare with the report generated for the pre-mission briefing," he said, sliding one of the sheets out where everyone could see.

"You're a cartographer, too? Jesus, Daniel." O'Neill had an expression akin to exasperation on his face.

"Well, I never thought of it like that. . ."

"No. You wouldn't. Aside from following my orders, is there anything you can't do?"

Daniel seemed to speed up all over, the way he did when he was flustered. He blinked rapidly; one hand came up in an unconscious defensive gesture, and he spoke as though fighting to fit words into an argument. "Look, if you're going to manage a dig for any length of time you have to know how to map out the various excavations and their positions relative to each -"

Jack put up a hand of his own. "Relax. I'm just wondering what else you can do that you don't think is worth the bother of mentioning." He shook his head, slowly.

"Lasagna."

It was O'Neill's turn to blink. "Excuse me?"

"I make really good lasagna; but that's probably not relevant right now."

Trust Daniel to make a quick recovery from almost any attempt to unbalance him, be it light-hearted or deadly serious. O'Neill adamantly refused to look at the other members of his team. They already knew they could think rings around his tired old mind; that didn't mean he had to give them the satisfaction of actually seeing the bewilderment on his face.

"You are correct, Daniel Jackson; your culinary expertise is not at issue, except perhaps as a means for O'Neill to interrupt your analysis of the UAV data for P2X-357."

 _Oh, thanks, big guy._ Now he got to resist temptation and refuse to hear the snicker that his 2IC was trying so hard to suppress. He could see Teal'c out of the corner of his eye, however, looking as inscrutable as usual. At least Daniel had the courtesy to pretend to ignore both of them, and allow himself to be brought back to his topic.

"Um. Yes. Working from the UAV transcripts, this is the map that I've been able to put together so far. It's still a little rough, because I was trying to sort out the most important data first."

He touched a fingertip to the center of the sheet. "The Stargate is here; you can see it's in something of a shallow depression - oh, sorry, um, the brown lines are topographic contour lines; hills, valleys, elevation markers, that kind of thing. Again, very rough, I'm certain I overlooked - anyway. Green represents heavier vegetation, yellow the grassy areas that Sam already described."

Sam leaned in, gestured toward one corner of the sheet. "What's this ring here?"

"Almost certainly the settlement that SG-4 visited to make first contact; there might be other stuff just outside the UAV's range, and I wouldn't be able to show it here. But this is definitely a settlement of some kind."

"Couldn't it be a crater, with the edges wearing down over time?"

"Sure, it could be, with just the topographical data to go on, but when you add in the infrared," Daniel held up a red marker, "you see the shapes of roofs here, here, and here." He outlined three segments within the ring as he spoke. "You even get the heat from the sun bouncing off them, like this -" he filled in his marks, "-and even better, there's a cool area, here, that corresponds to this water flow from the aerial photography. That 's either a well, or a dammed section of the creek. Definitely not a natural formation, either way, given its shape."

Carter looked up at him in admiration. "Nice."

"Satellite archaeology was never my specialty, but it definitely has its uses. The UAV is a decent substitute for a satellite, in cases like this one."

Jack stepped away from the table and poured another round of coffee for everybody. "So, does that mean you got something?"

"Well, yes and no." Daniel set the pen down, and leaned against the edge of the table. "I've got a settlement here, almost definitely still in use, or only recently abandoned - the buildings appear to be in good repair, and there's a pretty visible road or trail of some sort as well. But I was looking for some sign of interaction between human and alien populations, something that would explain who that woman in the infirmary is, or how she came to be on this planet." He looked at his teammates, one by one. "Right now, either that settlement is completely human, or the people who live there have blended so long that they're one culture, or there's a settlement with all the answers just outside the UAV range, where it does me no good at all."

O'Neill took a sip from his mug. "So. . . you got nothing."

Daniel took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. "I told you this wasn't my day."

"You are distressed, Daniel Jackson?" Teal'c sat gracefully, seeming to fill the space across from Dr. Jackson at the long table.

"It's nothing, Teal'c, thanks. Just got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, I suppose."

"I was unaware that there was a correct side of the bed from which to rise."

O'Neill smirked. "It's another Tau'ri expression, big guy. He's having a bad day."

Teal'c considered for a moment, then nodded gravely. "I see. In what way may I be of assistance?"

Major Carter helped Daniel to roll up his map and place it with his other drawings. "I know we kept our note to you pretty short; have you heard yet about General Hammond?"

"I have. In addition, I sought Captain Bryant, Hammond's personal aide, to obtain information before joining you here. It appears that our goal is to attempt to learn more about this woman, and the threat she may represent, by learning more about P2X-357; we are constrained, however, from traveling there and from obtaining a report from SG-4, both by the facility lockdown and by the quarantine which Doctor Fraiser has placed upon the infirmary."

"Yep," O'Neill said, "That's about the size of it." He waved a hand dismissively at the stack of file folders before him. "So far the twins here haven't found anything that wasn't already in the reports, and there's not much in there to begin with."

He picked up his coffee and began to pace. "Jungle planet - a lot like Earth - definitely could support a human colony. The snakes know about it, so there could be a human colony there - or not; they're just as likely to wring a planet of its resources and move on. Daniel, any sign that there's still a Goa'uld presence?"

"Um, not really, if I had to guess. There are no major structures, nothing that immediately struck me as a palace or temple. It's possible that the village itself was built on the ruins of a larger settlement, but now? Probably not more than a hundred, hundred-fifty people living there."

"That's not enough to support a snake, is it - they like their creature comforts, right?"

"That's one way of putting it, yes. . . but like I said, there could be something just off the map that -"

"Let's work with what we've got for the time being. What else ya got on this village?"

"Um, it's suggestive of a fairly primitive culture, from what I could tell; yes, here it is." Daniel pulled out the original UAV transcript. "These are still shots of the village area; I didn't use them before because I didn 't want to have any preconceived ideas while I put the map together."

Setting the photographs next to his map, Daniel continued. "If you take a look, you'll see that these buildings are uneven looking, like the walls aren't straight. Here, do you see it? That's probably a mud hut, maybe even a thatch-walled structure given the climate, with some kind of thatched roof. The engineering on this can't have been very advanced or the walls would be straighter - or more circular - closer to a uniform shape in any case."

Sam frowned at the images, then at Daniel and the colonel. "The Goa'uld keep their slaves in pretty primitive conditions, right?"

Daniel tilted his head, and said doubtfully, "Yes, but their slaves are almost always human. SG-4 definitely reported aliens in the settlement."

"Teal'c?"

"I do not recognize P2X-357 from the MALP images, O'Neill. However, I believe that Daniel Jackson is correct in believing that the Goa'uld have not maintained a presence on this planet, if in fact they were ever permanently established there."

"So, again, we got nothing." O'Neill stopped pacing. "Damn. Bryant!"

The captain put his head in at the doorway. "Sir?"

"Any word from the infirmary yet?"

"No, sir. I'm still -"

The briefing room telephone rang.

* * *

Dr. Janet Fraiser found the general waiting just outside her office, a disposable surgical mask tied loosely over his face. Hooking a finger in her own mask, she pulled it down around her neck, then opened the office door and beckoned him inside.

"Thank you for being so patient, General. I'm sorry I kept you waiting for so long."

Hammond untied his mask and sat down. "Never mind that, Doctor. You did what you needed to. I assume you can shed a little light on our mystery patient?"

"Some, yes." Dr. Fraiser swept her hands over her hair, catching a few stray wisps and tucking them behind her ears, and moved to sit behind her desk. "If you like, we can talk with Captain Stefanopoulos and he can debrief you about the mission. As long as we stay outside his isolation unit, there's no risk."

"I will want to hear his report, Doctor, but first I want to hear yours - and since Colonel O'Neill is the acting Commander of this facility while I'm in quarantine, he should hear it too." He nodded toward the telephone. "He should be in the briefing room with the rest of SG-1."

Dr. Fraiser immediately hit "speakerphone" and dialed the extension. On the second ring, a young-sounding voice answered. "Briefing room."

Hammond leaned forward. "Captain Bryant, Dr. Fraiser and I are looking for Colonel O'Neill and SG-1."

"They're here, sir - just a moment." There was an indistinct murmur of voices, then the echoing sound that indicated that Bryant had switched to speakerphone at his end of the line. After a pause, a new voice spoke.

"O'Neill here, and before we get started may I just say what a refreshing change of pace it is to be ordered not to go to the infirmary?"

The good doctor rolled her eyes. "I could say it's equally refreshing not having you underfoot, Colonel. We should avoid each other more often."

"There now, you see? Never let it be said that we can't get along - I think that's a great idea."

"I'm sure you do. When did you say your next physical was?" She couldn't help herself - a decidedly unprofessional (one might even say evil) grin blossomed with the sudden silence at the other end of the line.

 _It's like herding cats, some days,_ Hammond thought to himself. "If you two are quite finished?"

"Hanging on your every word, sir, ready when you are."

Fraiser immediately sobered, settling into her chair as she began.

"Yes, sir. We have a Jane Doe, female, age undetermined, but definitely human." She gave Hammond a wry smile. "MRI scan reveals all the correct organs, in all the correct places, sir. More importantly, there is no trace of a Goa'uld anywhere on the scans. We have a blood sample in the lab right now, checking for disease as well as the protein marker that would indicate whether she ever carried a symbiote. My guess, however, is not."

Hammond put in, "You said 'age undetermined', Doctor. Why is that?"

"A good question, sir. Ordinarily, I can make an age estimate based on muscle and skin tone, facial wrinkles, white hair, and other factors such as the development of internal organs. However, the patient came to us dangerously dehydrated, which skews those factors considerably. Wrinkles become more pronounced, for example; the skin becomes not only dry but loose, if there isn't enough fluid in the tissues underneath to support it." She shook her head. "My best guess right now is to put her age somewhere between her twenties and forties; I'll be able to give you a more accurate range as she recovers."

"Will she recover, do you think?" Dr. Jackson's voice as it came over the phone sounded genuinely concerned.

"So far, she's made remarkable progress. As I said, she was extremely dehydrated when SG-4 brought her through the Stargate, and nearing total physical collapse - meaning that her internal organs were almost ready to shut down completely. That can be fatal if it isn't treated in time, and may still leave permanent damage to her internal organs and nervous system. I've been given to understand that the weather on that planet was pretty warm today; if she had been in good health to begin with, the heat might not have affected her as severely. As it is, the high temperature, compounded with the lack of water in her system, kicked her into the beginning stages of heatstroke - which I'm sure you know can also be fatal. On the other hand, it's entirely possible that the heat wasn't a factor; severe dehydration will shut down the body's ability to regulate temperature, just as heatstroke will."

As she paused to consider, O'Neill's voice cut in. "So what's the good news?"

"Well, Colonel, as I said, she has made remarkable progress. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if she's carrying a disease at all, since her recovery so far has been so rapid. Her fever began to subside, without medication, almost as soon as we began treating her, and continued to drop throughout the MRI and other tests we've run. She's nearly at normal temperature now. She's receiving fluids intravenously, and her blood pressure and heart rate have begun to stabilize. If she were sick, I would expect those symptoms to take longer to abate."

She tapped the status summary on her desk, and glanced at Hammond. "In addition, knowing that she's human expands my treatment options considerably. The preliminary blood tests should be back from the lab in a few minutes, and I expect them to confirm what the MRI tells me. Her other injuries appear to be minor - two cracked ribs, and a sprained ankle - but again, dehydration can mask other injuries."

"How's that, Doctor?"

"Think of it this way, sir: if you bump your head, you'll get a goose egg, a lump, caused by a fluid buildup in the injured area. It's one of the body's ways of speeding the healing process."

Daniel jumped in again. "But she doesn't have enough fluids right now to. . ."

"To produce any kind of swelling; that's it exactly. I expect, over the next few days, to see a number of hidden injuries surface as her body becomes capable of handling them. However, they should all be minor bumps and bruises - anything more severe should have been picked up on the MRI. I 'm more concerned about the internal damage that may appear during that time."

"Bumps and bruises don't sound like 'sick' to me, Doc." Janet could hear the consideration in O'Neill's voice.

"You're right, Colonel; in fact, I have a few unanswered questions surrounding this case, which I'd like to discuss with you all in a moment. First, though, I'd like to talk about lifting the overall lockdown on the SGC. I plan to keep SG-4 here overnight, and maintain the quarantine on the infirmary, as a precaution; however, the biohazard team did not detect any trace of contaminant in the gate room, so the rest of the facility should be clean as well. Assuming the blood work for our Jane Doe comes back negative for disease, I should be able to lift the infirmary quarantine, too, probably by tomorrow morning. If it turns out that she is sick, then I'll order a second series of tests for SG-4 and we'll go from there; however, as things stand now, I'm confident that they, and General Hammond, will be able to return to regular duty soon."

"Sounds like a reasonable plan, Doctor. Colonel O'Neill, see that base staff are notified once we've finished here." Hammond shifted in his seat. "Before we move on to your unanswered questions, is there anything else about the patient's condition that we should know?"

Fraiser looked thoughtful for a moment, and began ticking symptoms off on her fingers. "I've already covered moderate to severe dehydration; possible heatstroke; possible damage to internal organs as the body shuts down; and additional physical injuries, which to me are indicative of a fall, or possibly physical assault. Actually, that's my first question: Is she sick, or is she suffering from abuse of some kind? What caused this?

"Moving on, the patient remains unconscious, but not comatose; this is a promising sign. Current monitoring includes hourly urinalysis, which will allow us to check for organ damage and healthy kidney function, and blood analysis for disease, Goa'uld presence, and organ damage. Treatment, now that her temperature is in a normal range, is to keep it there for her until she can do so on her own, as well as replenishing her fluids. To that end, we have her in climate-controlled isolation, hooked up to both glucose and saline IVs. We may have to perform dialysis, but that depends on the urinalysis results, and how quickly we can establish kidney function. With dehydration, the body will sometimes stop producing urine; how quickly production restarts is a good indicator of her overall prognosis."

She glanced at the summary again. "As for medication, while we were removing the mud and other debris, we found that she'd picked up a mild fungal infection, similar to athlete's foot but more widespread. We've applied a topical ointment to knock it back. Other than that, unless her fever returns or she exhibits other signs of illness, drugs shouldn't be necessary."

Janet sat back in her seat and ran her hands over her hair again. "For the time being, that's all I have. The next few hours of monitoring, plus the results of the blood tests, will decide the rest."

"Thank you, Doctor. I'm sure you're doing everything you can to help this woman," said Hammond.

She reached behind her for the bottled water she always kept on hand, and offered one to the general before continuing. "Thank you, sir. As always, time will tell, but she's proven to be surprisingly resilient so far. I would guess that she was in excellent health not too long ago - which, as I already mentioned, is the first of the questions I can't answer. I'd love to know what caused her to be in this condition in the first place." Leaning forward, she flipped the top page of the medical summary over to reveal two color photos, printed side by side on the next page. "Here's another mystery."

Her commanding officer frowned, craning his neck as he tried to puzzle out the image. "What am I looking at, Doctor?"

"This is a pair of shots we took of Jane Doe's neck and throat. From Captain Stefanopoulos, I've heard that this mission was to a fairly primitive culture." She raised her voice slightly for her listeners in the briefing room. "Is that correct?"

"Um, yes," said Dr. Jackson, "at least, according to the architecture that the UAV showed. My assessment is that the culture would have Stone Age or possibly Iron Age technology, and Jack says the original mission briefings match that."

"Right. In these photos - I can email you a scan if you don't want to wait out the quarantine - the patient is wearing a necklace of some sort, very closely fitted but not so much that it would impair her breathing. The kicker is, my medical staff couldn't find a way to remove it prior to the MRI. How 'primitive' does that sound to you?"

There was a pause at the other end of the line. When Sam spoke, she sounded more than a little intrigued. "You couldn't get it off at all?"

The doctor frowned and shook her head, her eyes still on the photo. "She's still wearing it. The whole thing looks like it's made of silver, but it has a really complex-looking link. It's more like a weave than a chain, if that makes sense. In front there's a narrow oval jewel, a kind of dark pink, in a smooth setting, and in the back there's a small round setting, about a centimeter across, with another jewel set there. We thought that was the clasp, but there's nothing to get hold of, no obvious connection."

"You said it fit her snugly?"

"Yes, but I'm afraid I can't describe it much more clearly than that. I'll get a copy of this image and email it to you both, so you can see for yourself." Janet smiled. "When the quarantine is lifted, maybe Dr. Jackson can ask her about it."

"Thanks, Dr. Fraiser, I'd appreciate that. And maybe Teal'c will recognize something, too."

The big man's voice rumbled over the speakerphone. Janet hadn't realized he was even in the room. "That is possible, Daniel Jackson, Doctor Fraiser. I shall endeavor to do so, once I am able to study these images."

Daniel prompted her again, "Um, you said you had 'questions', plural?"

Dr. Fraiser took a sip from her bottled water before continuing. "Only one more, and it's not a question I can answer, though I'm sure you're already working on it. First, SG-4 told my staff that they encountered aliens on this planet, and they were very clear that these beings looked in no way similar to us. This woman was the only other human being that they reported seeing. Second, as part of the quarantine, SG-4 brought all their belongings with them as well, which we've gradually been sanitizing and removing from the infirmary." She looked up suddenly. "That reminds me, General, all their weapons should be back in the Armory by now." She went on, "In addition to their own gear, SG-4 was carrying a pack of some sort, which they say the aliens insisted they take with them. My guess is that it belongs to our patient. It's a basic-looking carryall, not unlike something any of us might carry, but apparently the aliens only wore skins and twisted grass."

The doctor leaned forward, and looked at Hammond intently. "Where did our patient come from, if not that planet?"

There was a knock at the door. Janet and Hammond looked up to see a nurse standing in the doorway, holding a file folder and beckoning the doctor to join her.

"If you'll excuse me, everyone, it looks like the lab results are beginning to come back for everyone's blood tests." She nodded to the general and stepped outside, shutting the door behind her.

* * *

In the briefing room, Daniel could hear Dr. Fraiser's office door close, then Hammond's voice sounded again. "Colonel O'Neill, given the information we have so far, what is your assessment of this situation?"

The colonel was leaning on the edge of the table, as Daniel had been a few minutes ago, facing toward the phone. "So far, sir, I'd have to say she's not from the neighborhood. My first guess is prisoner. Whether she got kicked around before or after she was taken into custody is up in the air. At the moment she's not a threat to us, but she's still an unknown. Once she wakes up, she could be a danger to the facility."

"Or not, sir," Carter said suddenly, looking up. "If she's such a threat, why did the aliens hand her over to us, when they obviously had her under control?"

"Why did they kick SG-4 out of town so fast?" O'Neill countered. "We're human, she's human. Maybe they just don't like our kind."

"They're afraid," said Daniel, half to himself. The rest of his team stopped and looked at him. "I, um, I can't explain it very well, sorry, but that's the impression I get."

"So, explain it badly, then." The colonel sat down slowly, and Sam, her legs curled under her in the briefing room chair, only took a sip from her coffee and said nothing. Teal'c looked at him expectantly.

"Well, I was just thinking, a lot of the times that we've gone through the Stargate, the people on the other side have thought we were gods, or at least superior beings. There are a lot of beliefs and myths about the Stargate itself, and about who uses it, after all."

His teammates didn't seem ready to throw his hypothesis out the window, so he continued. "Assume this woman didn't come from P2X-357. Her gear - her technology level - doesn't match with what SG-4 found in the village, or even with what the UAV shows. I mean, it could be that she's from there, like a, an American visiting the Kalahari Bushmen or living with the Australian Aborigines, but it's not likely, and it doesn't explain the way they treated her or SG-4."

Sam frowned over her mug. "So she came to this planet through the Stargate, and the people attacked her because they thought she was a god? That doesn' t quite make sense - I mean, wouldn't they try to appease her or something instead?"

Jack shrugged. "If they're naturally aggressive, and there's only one of her and a hundred of them. . . They might have decided SG-4 would be too hard to subdue."

Daniel tilted his head. "That assumes that the aliens attacked her. From what Dr. Fraiser has described, it could be that she hurt herself, traveling through the jungle."

Teal'c responded, "In that scenario, the aliens of the village would then be benefactors, attempting to assist a fallen god and fearful of failure. When SG-4 appeared, they may have believed themselves about to receive punishment. It is likewise possible that they assumed SG-4 had come to claim the woman for themselves, either as a prisoner or to assist her."

Daniel shrugged as Sam looked up at her CO. "Both those scenarios sound plausible, sir. They wouldn't necessarily even have to be familiar with people like us, for either one of those to work."

"And if they are familiar with human beings?" Jack looked down, saw how his second-in-command was sitting, and nudged her chair with an exasperated frown.

Daniel answered him, "Then they could think we're Goa'uld, which would certainly give them a reason to be afraid of us."

"But not a reason to attack the woman." The Jaffa sitting across from him spoke with certainty. "If they believed her to be one of the false gods, they would be too frightened to move against her. Also, we have established that this planet does not appear to have been visited by the Goa'uld in some time, if ever."

The four seated at the table lapsed into thoughtful silence for a long moment. Daniel was startled from his musings by Jack's voice, in full colonel mode.

"Regardless, General, this. . .person. . . is an unknown entity as far as we 're concerned." O'Neill folded his arms. "Recommend we keep her under 24-hour guard until we can establish the level of threat she represents," he looked at his teammates, "or not, whatever."

Hammond's voice sounded over the speakerphone. "These are all valid ideas, SG-1, and I thank you for jumping in to assist Colonel O'Neill on short notice. For the time being, we will operate under the assumption that this woman did not originally come from P2X-357. Whether or not the aliens were helping her, or holding her prisoner, is a question she will have to answer for us when she recovers. In the meantime, Colonel, assign a guard to the outside of the infirmary, to adhere to the quarantine restrictions. We can shift them to guard only her room later. I would also appreciate you taking the base out of lockdown status."

As O'Neill left the room, Hammond spoke again. "Are there any other ideas that the rest of you would like to explore in the interim?"

"Well, actually - " "Yes sir, her -"

To Daniel, Teal'c appeared to be amused as his two younger teammates spoke at once. Daniel gestured to Sam to continue.

"I know that I would be very interested in learning more about whatever might be in that pack, sir, the one that SG-4 brought back with them. If she's from a more advanced culture than 357, she may have technology that could be useful to us."

"I'm interested in looking over that equipment as well," said Daniel, "but for different reasons. If it belongs to her, it could tell us a lot about the kind of culture that she would be familiar with; knowing even a little bit about that would make it easier to communicate with her, and in the long run hopefully with her people. More than just borrowing her technology, it' s possible that we could help her return to her home planet and possibly establish some kind of alliance, or friendly association, anyway."

Daniel bit his lip for a moment, then continued, "Besides, General, if that pack does belong to her, I don't think we have any right to just go through it and, if you'll forgive the expression, 'play with her toys' while she's incapable of saying no."

"Again, valid points from both of you, Doctor, Major. However, examination of this pack and its contents, whatever they may be, will have to wait until they're released from biohazard containment." Sam and Daniel each looked up for a moment as, over the public address, they heard Colonel O'Neill's voice issuing the all clear. When it ended, Hammond continued, "If I may suggest, now would be a good time for you both to wrap up for the day. This situation is likely to occupy a good bit of your time in the near future; take what free time you can."

* * *

Later that night, Daniel sat on the balcony of his apartment, idly stirring a mug of instant soup and cradling his journal on his lap; the stars were shining overhead, but he'd been preoccupied, allowing his thoughts to drift back over the afternoon's events, and hadn't put pen to paper yet.

The phone conference between SG-1, the general, and Dr. Fraiser hadn't lasted much longer - the doctor had returned with the good news that neither the woman, nor any of the personnel returning from the planet, appeared to carry any foreign disease. After a follow-up series of tests in the morning, the quarantine would probably be lifted. Jack had, predictably, made some quip about having to relinquish the reins of power so soon, which he retracted very quickly when Hammond threatened to leave him in charge, effectively chained to a desk, for a few extra days.

Sam's suggestion to visit the planet and search for more information was turned down by both commanders, because as Jack pointed out SG-4 was still technically assigned to that mission. She hadn't seemed disappointed, more as though she had expected that answer but wanted to give voice to the option, just in case.

After everyone had hung up, Teal'c had accompanied Daniel back to his office, where they found Dr. Fraiser's email containing the pictures of the woman's necklace waiting. At first glance, there was nothing familiar to Daniel about the jewelry, nor did it suggest a relationship to a culture that he might recognize. On the suspicion that he would need to examine the necklace in person while talking to the woman, he'd given the printout to Teal'c to study, trusting the warrior's long memory and more extensive familiarity with other planets to provide better results than he could.

His friend had only been gone a few minutes, and Daniel was trying to decide whether or not to begin refitting the shards of the vessel he'd shattered that morning, when Jack had descended from on high and practically chased him out of the mountain: "Translations, remember? 'Cosmic hostility', remember? 'Going home now', remember? Get outta here, already!" - so he'd gathered his notes and gotten out.

The translation itself, once he'd gotten home, had not been difficult, but it had taken much longer than it should have. Daniel found that his thoughts kept wandering back to the mystery patient, shut away in the infirmary under the mountain. Try as he might, the woman (and he wanted to learn her name soon, calling her "the woman" was beginning to irritate him) and her surrounding enigma continued to distract him at odd moments throughout the evening's work. He was grateful when he could finally shut his reference books and his laptop, and focus his attention on this new puzzle. His brain had apparently decided it would be more intriguing hours ago.

All his life, Daniel had been in the habit of paying attention to distracting thoughts, song lyrics stuck in his head, unusual dreams, and other "mental clutter", regarding them as messages from the more intuitive part of his mind. The connections he made tended to bear fruit more often than not, though not always in a way that made immediate sense. It wasn't until he was firmly established in his academic career that Dr. Jackson had discovered that his thought process, while completely "normal" from his point of view, was radically different from his peers'.

For some reason, his mind was trying to tell him something about the woman that SG-4 had brought home. All he had to do now was wait, and listen, and try to figure out what the signals from his intuition meant. Releasing a deep breath, he spooned up another mouthful of noodles, and pondered.

It occurred to Daniel that he'd not even seen the woman, nor did he have a description of her from either Hammond or Dr. Fraiser. From the photos of the necklace, he could see that her skin tone was similar to his own, but that was all. _She's a complete stranger. I don't know enough about her, on any level, to be more than mildly curious. Why is she stuck in my mind?_ She had come through the Gate on a stretcher - he and Sam had reviewed both the MALP transmission and the day's security camera footage together at one point (which reminded him, he needed to ask Jack sometime why he was pretending not to need reading glasses). Once through the Stargate, the medical team had immediately taken her and SG-4 to the infirmary. She was almost certainly in a bed now, cleaned up a little, her old clothing discarded and replaced with the loose gown that was the standard uniform for hospital patients throughout North America. She would rest, recover, and eventually wake up and tell them all what she was doing on 357 in the first place; then he, or SG-4, could take her home. Problem solved.

Daniel frowned at the stars. _That sounds right, well actually it sounds like Jack, but it doesn't feel right. Let's replay that a little slower this time._ He swallowed more noodles, and recalled the times he had been restricted to an infirmary bed himself, waking up dazed, hurt, or sick; recalled chocolates and walnut cookies smuggled in to alleviate the monotony of clear broth every day, and Janet chasing his teammates out to let him rest because he could almost never bear to send them away himself. He remembered sitting the night watch, too, waiting for one of his adopted, multi-planetary family to wake, while he sat in a hard plastic chair keeping vigil with his hope and his fear.

Turning his thoughts back to "Jane Doe", the puzzle began to take on clarity and shape. _She's going to wake up alone_ , he realized. _SG-4 are in their own isolation unit under quarantine, and the nurses don't sit and wait for anybody to wake up, they're too busy. The likelihood of her even speaking our language, much less knowing to, to push the "call button", is incredibly small._ He gathered his journal and stood, certain that he'd found the root of his discomfort.

Gulping the remnants of lukewarm soup in his mug, Daniel strode across the room and scooped up the telephone. It would take a few minutes to route his call from security to switchboard and the infirmary, but he didn't care. _She's going to wake up in a strange place, and have no one there to tell her that it's safe to go back to sleep._

* * *

She was drifting within her mind, barely aware of her body, floating through a flickering haze of dreams and memories; floating, like the time that she'd actually managed to fall asleep in the Baths during one of the wilder Birthing Festivals. She'd been singing and dancing and generally running herself into the ground for days on end, and finally drifted off in her lover Kurshta's arms (or had it been Anaya? Or both?), and woken to realize that Kurshta was cradling the back of her neck, keeping her face out of the steaming waters while she dozed.

There was something about that memory that seemed important, but she was too busy remembering the brilliant smile Kurshta had given her, and his kiss; oh, his kisses were the sweetest back then. She smiled in return, and drifted along with him, in the Baths and the heat.

 _Be careful, grinning woman, or you'll get mud in your teeth. . ._ Where did that thought come from? Mud? That made no sense. These were the Baths - but no. That time with Kurshta and Anaya (it had been both of them, she was almost sure), that had been at least two years ago by now, hadn't it?

Memory crept softly in, replacing the dream; the shouts and song of the Birthing Festival shifted, became angry, the howls of a mob: "Defiler! Defiler!" they had screamed, beating her with fists and kicking her after she had fallen, ripping at her robe, leaving her breathless with pain, gasping out protests until a heel had connected with her temple. _But I'm not, I didn't, please. . . don't call me. . . my name is. . ._

She stirred and whimpered soundlessly, and more memories returned. She had woken in the dirt under a hot sun, the Ancients' Portal behind her and her hands bound before her. She could barely see through swollen, blackened eyes, and every breath brought with it a knifelike, stabbing agony in her side. Her head had throbbed from the beating, and she thought she remembered the sun going down while she worked to untie herself, spitting bits of fiber gnawed from the rope, pulling at the knots with her teeth, until her jaw joined with the rest of her head and her entire skull felt like it was caught in a stone-crusher. She had finally managed to crawl into the shelter of a stand of trees, too weary even to lift her head, staying conscious only through desperate stubbornness until she thought she was safe. She must have passed out again, though, from the exertion.

Drift, flicker, dream, float. . . When next she woke it was to darkness and stifling heat, so thirsty that she was unaware of any other pain. The sun fought its way through cracks in the crude clay walls. If it hadn't been for the shard of light glancing off the bowl of water in the corner, she would have missed it completely. She drank it all, every day when it was refilled, but it was never enough to satisfy, no matter how slowly she savored or how quickly she drained it. After a few days she was reduced to licking the last drops from the bowl, and it still wasn't enough.

The floor of the hut was mud, heavy and thick; as she knelt over the bowl each day her knees would sink into the mire. As hot as it was, the mud never dried, only cooled with each nightfall, until she curled painfully to conserve warmth, praying that she wouldn't shiver because shivering set her ribs on fire. When morning came, she would have all the warmth she craved, and then more and more, until balm became bane and she clawed weakly at the cracks, sobbing for a breath of moving air to cool her.

She stirred again, almost awake but fighting it. She was weaker every day, and knew that it was a matter of time before reaching the bowl with its meager handfuls of water would be too much effort, too much pain to endure for too little reward. It would be better to drift through the heat and pretend she was back at the Baths.

The Baths. . . something important. . . oh, yes. The water. Acres of it, fed by hot springs and cold, pools for bathing and for relaxing with friends, deep enough to swim in or shallow enough to cool tired feet while you walked with your lovers. All that water, she was desperate for water, to drink, to soak in through her skin, to immerse herself in and find oblivion, the way she'd once slept with Kurshta's hand behind her neck. The thought of all that water was torture to her, while she lay here in the mud, so far away from home. She curled her fingers, expecting to feel the muck squelch in her fists -

And felt fabric, instead. Her brow furrowed in confusion, and she splayed her hand out again to be sure. The fingertips of one hand slipped across dry, smooth fabric, cool but not cold. How long had it been since she had felt something like that? Like - like bed sheets?

She'd begun to have visions during the hottest part of the days, but so far none of them had been as nice as this. She didn't even feel hot. It would be best not to open her eyes, yet; much better to drift here for a little while, and pretend - pretend that she was home, or anywhere else, pretend she wasn't dying alone in a mud hut on the wrong side of the Ancients' Portal, where no one would sing for her once she was gone.

It would do no good to weep. Her tears had dried up some time before the visions had started. She would comfort herself, instead, with the feel of the sheets under her fingers until the dream faded; then she would try to crawl to the water bowl again.

She sighed, and drifted. The fingers of one hand caressed the sheets, and after a time she slept.

* * *

"So what did Janet say?"

"That she was in isolation and monitored constantly, and that if she woke up we'd be the first to know. She also said, given the woman's condition, it was, let me see, 'highly unlikely that she'll regain consciousness before midmorning', and even then she probably wouldn't be really lucid for more than a few seconds at a time." Daniel was sitting on a counter top in the lab where Sam Carter did most of her work analyzing, tearing down, and sometimes rebuilding machinery that they brought back through the Stargate. Apart from his own office, Sam's lab was a favorite refuge when Daniel needed to think through a particularly difficult problem, or just vent with a close friend.

He shrugged now, long fingers curled around a fresh mug of coffee from his and Sam's secret stash. "In retrospect, it was about what I expected her to say. Kind of stupid of me to bother her, I guess."

"Hey. Never say that." Sam's eyes danced with a quick grin, hidden behind her own mug. "The Colonel would never let you live it down if he heard you." She sobered and went on, "Besides, I think your calling last night was - well, it's that part of you that, that connects to people, if that makes sense. I mean, it's what you do, but it's also who you are."

Daniel ducked his head self-consciously. "I don't know why it bothers me so much, but it does. I mean I don't know anything about her. Why should I care?"

 _Maybe because you of all of us know best what it's like to be alone. Or maybe because, since Abydos, you've never had to be,_ thought Sam, but she only nodded sympathetically. "Did you hear about SG-4?"

"About the quarantine being lifted? Yes, I found out when I got in this morning. I hope their return trip goes well."

"Did you want to see them off? They'll be leaving soon," said Sam, nudging a couple of tools out of her way.

Daniel's chuckle was rare, and even nicer to hear for its rarity. "What I want is to go with them. Jack already said no, though." He rolled his eyes. "I'm needed here, he said. Doing what, exactly, he wouldn't tell me, but you know how he gets."

Sam smiled again, wider this time. "Please don't tell me you called him a mother hen to his face again."

Her "little brother" blushed. "Ah - no. Whether he wants to believe it or not, my survival instincts have improved over the years."

* * *

Captain David "Steffo" Stefanopoulos ran his hands through a shock of thick, black hair, clenching his hands behind his head as he sat at the briefing room table. His team had completed their original mission to P2X-357, gone through their second infirmary check in as many days, and were finally ready to debrief, get home, and (in Steffo's case at least) get some sleep. It had been a long day, capping an equally long week.

"What we found in the village was consistent with MALP and UAV reports, sirs," he said, addressing both General Hammond and Colonel O'Neill. "Mud huts, thatch roofs, all of it. The grassy areas off to the side turned out to be the first attempts at agriculture - we were able to get grain samples, this time, for the lab guys - but there's no naquadah anywhere in a ten-mile radius of the place."

"You didn't have any problem with the aliens living there?" asked Hammond.

"No, sir. Well, no hostility, I should say. They were - they seemed - afraid of us. Where yesterday they were practically in our faces to take the girl out of there, this time it took an hour before any of them would come out of their huts to even look at us."

The colonel looked up at that, eyebrows raised. "Surprised to see you back, were they?"

Steffo's 2IC, Lieutenant Luis Reyes, spoke next. "Sir. We were able to communicate with them this time, barely - they spoke a few words that sounded like the Jaffa language, only "older" if that makes sense. Kind of the difference between Shakespeare and modern English, you know? As far as we could tell, nobody else, Goa'uld or otherwise, has been through that Gate in so long, they all had forgotten that it did anything."

With a glance at his CO, Reyes continued, "Teal'c only taught me a little bit of Jaffa, sir, so I have no idea how well I translated any of what they said. . ." Piece by piece, he outlined the aliens' tale. While they had stories about gods who came to their world to rule, none of those stories seemed to describe where the gods came from, or how they arrived on their world. No one seemed to have any idea that the Stargate was a device used for travel. When a hunting party told how they had found a being, with strange clothes and stranger features, the village elders concluded that the gods were testing them. Setting a watch on the valley - which happened to contain a large stone ring - they put the being into a sick room and waited for it to awaken and tell them how they might serve. To their dismay, however, the being seemed to grow weaker as days passed.

Stefanopoulos picked up the thread. "When we came through the Stargate, the watch party headed back to notify their people. We never saw them ourselves, but by the time we reached the village, everybody knew we were coming. As far as we could tell, they were floored that we had walked out of the "stone ring" - Reyes told us they used to think it was just another landmark or something. Anyway, because of that, they were convinced that the gods had sent us too, either to reclaim the woman, since she looked like us, or to punish them for not taking better care of her." He ran his hands through his hair again. "So, to head off the punishment, they dragged her out and more or less begged us to take her and go. Which we did, and you know the rest."

He frowned in disgust and looked at Hammond. "General, we thought before that these guys were getting hostile with us - loud, demanding, all that. When we came back we learned otherwise. Once we convinced them that they wouldn't die if they looked at us without permission," he sighed, "they told us the whole story. And then they tried to worship us. . . and then, finally, they figured it out and were happy to show us everything we wanted to know."

"Which wasn't much, you said."

"I'm afraid not, sir. It's up to the lab guys to tell us if any of the stuff we brought back is important. Even the village, if we understood it right, is only there during the wet season so they can grow the crops. The rest of the time, they follow migration routes for the hunt. First contact isn't really our strength, sir, but I didn't notice even so much as a string of beads on their chief."

There was a silence while the commanders considered that information, until O'Neill asked, "What else did they say about the woman?"

It was Reyes who answered him. "They - we think they asked about her, sir. They showed us the hut where they kept her, and the bowl of water they left for her to drink."

Steffo looked at his hands, folded on the table. "Now we know why she was covered in mud, anyway."

Reyes looked at his superior officers for a moment, before saying quietly, "They thought it would be good for her. It's what they do when they get sick - separate themselves from the rest of the group, and just ride it out until they recover."

O'Neill pinched the bridge of his nose, then squinted down the table at the assembled team. "So, you're saying she got so dehydrated that she nearly died - and she probably hasn't eaten in a while either - because they didn't know any better?" SG-4's captain only shrugged, still looking at his hands. No one else responded, and after a moment Hammond dismissed the team to two days' downtime.

After they had gone, O'Neill looked at the general, and shook his head. Pushing himself up from his chair, he turned and walked from the room.

* * *

It was much later when she felt herself surfacing again. For a moment she was afraid - sometimes, if she didn't wake up to drink the water, the bowl would be taken away still full, and she would be forced to go without until morning. _I don't know if I can survive much longer even if the bowl is still here. . ._ Ah, well, her friends had always said she had a stubborn streak. She could no more give up fighting for her life, even now, than she could have walked away from an invitation to dance back home.

She took a deep breath, steeling herself for the effort of turning over and crawling across the mud floor, and stopped in surprise. Her ribs didn't hurt as much. She still felt soft fabric under her fingers, and the air wasn't hot at all. She swallowed reflexively, and was stunned by the feel of saliva flooding her tongue. It felt so good that she took another breath, swallowed again, just to savor the sensations. Finally, curiosity got the better of her, and with an effort she opened her eyes.

Light!

 _Ow. Ow, that was. . . ow._ Holding her eyes closed for a moment, she waited for the pain to subside, and cautiously tried again. The light was still there, but off to one side; if she turned her head away, it wasn't so bad. As she moved, she could feel a pillow under her cheek, and now she could smell the fabric, too. There was something unfamiliar there, yet it somehow smelled clean, and come to think of it, the rich green reek of the mud was. . . missing.

She opened her eyes by degrees, blinking slowly and trying to focus. It wasn't a heat vision - she really was lying in a narrow bed, though the metal railing on the side reminded her more of an infant's crib than anything. The sheets were white, with a dull tan blanket over them. The rest of the room was gray, and looked funny, as if it had been made of something like giant-sized bricks that had been painted over. There was a closed door, darker gray, and a square window with some really bizarre covering, vertical strips of stiff fabric hanging all in a row from a bar at the window's top edge. The strips didn't overlap completely, but she couldn 't really make out what might be on the other side. Everything was rectangular, even the walls, rigid corners seeming to demand order and stillness. It was very weird.

She turned to the other side, careful not to look toward the light, and saw that she was alone in the room. The only furnishings were her bed, a small table or cabinet, and some. . . machine? It was something similar, some kind of instrument, anyway, sitting right next to the bed. A small screen had a green line of light that bounced across it in a regular pattern, and there were alien characters glowing along the bottom that changed every few moments. After studying it for a few breaths, she recognized the pattern. _I think that's a heartbeat. I think that's my heartbeat._ Come to think of it, there were fine-looking strings, _no, wires,_ that trailed from one side of the instrument and vanished under the sheet.

She brought her hands up from her sides to push the sheet aside, so she could try to follow the wires' path. Tried to bring her hands up, anyway - her left moved, weakly, but her right was held in place by some kind of soft cuff. She looked down and saw what looked like a clear tube or hose, with a needle in the end - that was piercing the back of her hand! She gasped and flinched, but the cuff held.

Very cautiously, she reached over with her left hand to touch. Yes, it really did go into her skin; not only that, it seemed to be perfectly centered on the big vein that ran across the back of her hand, not so low that flexing her wrist would hurt - she tried that, gingerly - and not high enough to impede the movement of her fingers. It felt strange, but it wasn' t painful. It wasn't even uncomfortable, but the sight of it was still a shock.

The tube went up to one side, close enough to the light that she had to squint and shade her eyes to see where it ended. There was some sort of clear bag hanging there, filled with water - at least, she assumed it was water - and a second, smaller bag next to it with another tube, this one trailing down again. Twitching the sheet aside, she saw another needle in the thin skin of her forearm. _No wonder they cuffed my hand to the rail. I could pull these out the wrong way if I weren't careful. I bet one good nightmare would do it._

There were still those wires to see about, so she moved her hand again, pulling the sheet down. She was a little nervous about what else she might find, but only saw a clean white smock, oversized and shapeless. Lifting the collar, she was rewarded with the sight of the wires, apparently glued directly to her upper chest. _At least nobody had the bright idea to try and pierce those,_ she thought, glancing down at her breasts. They seemed smaller than she remembered. _Probably lack of water. Anaya doesn't have to anything to be jealous of, now. At least I'm clean - well, cleaner, anyway._

She continued her inspection, carefully, finding a lot of bruises - no surprise, there - a dressing of some kind over her ribs, another tube, this one sticking out between her legs, _and I don't think I want to know if it' s putting things in or taking things out!,_ and a long bandage wrapped thickly around her right ankle. She tried to flex that, flinched, and decided that the bandage was probably a good idea. When had she done that? Or had it been part of the beating she'd gotten? Once she'd woken up, on the other side of the Ancients' Portal, she hadn't done any walking, only crawling or kneeling.

Suddenly she remembered the worst part of that ordeal, the part that woke her in the night even when she was so weak she couldn't sit up and scream, and her hand flew up to touch her throat. Her first wild hope was crushed when her fingers encountered the necklace. Finding the jewel in the hollow of her throat, she squeezed it and arched her head back; her face twisted in silent grief, even though what she wanted was to keen her anguish until it echoed. _No, no, no! Why? Please, why?_

She took deep, shuddering breaths, concentrating on her composure, swallowing hard to fight the tears that threatened. Now was not the time, and crying was of no use whatever. She'd already learned, lying awake in the hut, that the mesh the necklace was made from was stronger than she was; as much as she might wish it, there would be no tearing the thing from her neck and flinging it across the room. Gradually, her breathing slowed and deepened; her features smoothed over, and her fear and hurt began to subside.

When she felt herself calm, she let go of the jewel, lay back once more and tried to take stock of her new situation. She was weak, but no longer baking inside a hut in the jungle; thirsty, but apparently getting water into her system by an "alternative route"; still alone in a little room, but clean; still no music, and that damnable necklace, but there was the rhythm of her heart to watch if she wanted it.

The simple effort of looking around and thinking, trying to understand what was happening to her, had exhausted her. Still trying, still wondering whether she was safe or in a new kind of prison, her eyes fell closed, and she began to drift once more.

* * *

Nurse Claire Jefferson stepped into the infirmary's main isolation unit, grateful for the excuse to take herself out of range of the discussion going on between Dr. Fraiser and, from the look of it, all of SG-1. Before she closed the door, she could hear Colonel O'Neill's voice rising behind her. Against her better judgment she looked, and was surprised to see that O' Neill actually looked more worried than angry. In fact, to her eyes, the way they were all standing was more reminiscent of a conference than a confrontation. The colonel sounded as if he were "venting", as the rest of the nursing staff called it, the way he would if one of his team members were injured. Something must have gotten under his skin, anyway.

Shrugging, she turned toward the narrow bed that held "Danielle" - the name that the nursing staff had spontaneously given their newest patient not long after her arrival. The label "Jane Doe", more often than not, was given to unidentified corpses in civilian morgues; of course it was superstitious, but no one wanted to "jinx" this woman's recovery by calling her that. As for the new name, well, the patient had brown hair, blue eyes, and apparently quite a reserve of stubbornness, in order to have survived this far. Those features, combined with her presence in the infirmary to begin with, reminded many of Dr. Jackson - calling her "Danielle" was just the kind of grim joke for which medics were famous. Claire only hoped that the woman's nickname never reached his ears, although speculation about his possible reaction was certainly entertaining.

Unhooking the clipboard from the foot of the bed, the nurse let her thoughts wander while she ran the routine check of "Danielle's" vital signs. According to the cardiac monitor, her pulse and respiration were both within normal limits; her temperature was maintaining at normal as well. She tugged the sheet aside to check circulation in the woman's toes, a precaution in case the ankle bandage was fitted too tightly. Everything was fine; it looked like the patient might wake up any hour. In fact, Claire had overheard Dr. Fraiser saying that it was possible the patient already had woken the night before. No one had seen or heard anything - there were no security cameras in the infirmary to preserve the dignity of the patients - but the cardiac monitors had shown a marked change in her pulse for a minute or two, a few hours past midnight.

The nurse checked the catheter and collection bag (kidney function appeared normal, no sign of permanent organ damage, very good), then covered the patient's feet and moved around the bed, replacing the clipboard as she did so. Going through the Stargate wasn't for her, to be sure, but she was always curious about the people who came to them from other worlds. It was fascinating enough just to think that there were other worlds out there, and that the servicemen and civilians she helped care for actually traveled there on a regular basis. She wrapped the blood pressure cuff around "Danielle's" arm and placed the stethoscope in her ears. It was rare to host "foreign visitors", so to speak, for any length of time; Claire still remembered the odd, powder-white alien that SG-1 had brought back to Earth several years ago. What stories would this woman be able to tell them, when she woke?

As she squeezed the bulb, Claire saw the woman shift her head, from the corner of her eye. That was another good sign; she was beginning to react to stimuli.

* * *

Jack hadn't been able to help his reaction in the briefing room after Reyes' report. He was grateful that he'd managed to (mostly) keep his mouth shut in front of Hammond, but the entire thing was just unbelievable. _This woman gets the stuffing kicked out of her, and then, somehow, manages to wind up on the world with the most incompetent Good Samaritans in the galaxy. I'm not sure who will blow a gasket first, Carter, Daniel, or Fraiser._ Hell, the thought was almost enough to give  him a headache. _Talk about bad luck._

In any case, the doctor needed this information, and he was well aware that Daniel was fretting over the Mystery Woman, too; Janet had an email waiting for him when he'd come in that morning, mentioning Dr. Jackson's late-night phone call to check on her. So, after the debrief, he'd stopped by Daniel's office, found Carter and Teal'c sharing chocolate and bouncing ideas around, and had suggested that they all come with him and move their little after-hours party down to the infirmary. After one look at his expression, Daniel had dropped the protest and started asking what was wrong.

"Sorry, kids, the doc needs to be the first one to hear this. I just got out of debrief with SG-4."

So now, they were all standing outside Janet's office, and as O'Neill recited the basic facts, he could see his team growing more upset with each word. Jack had no idea where Daniel got his ideas from, most days of the week, but his instincts had been rock solid on this one - their latest visitor was likely to freak when she woke up in strange surroundings, given everything else she'd been through. Jack would definitely be sure to let him know that he'd done well in figuring that out ahead of the rest of them.

Carter, for her part, had a maternal streak in her whether she'd admit to it or not (her fear that it made her less of a soldier was bullshit, in Jack's none-too-humble opinion), and on top of that she had even less patience for incompetence than he did. Even so, Jack wasn't sure if she was more concerned for the woman or for Daniel. There was something going on under the surface that he decided her might ask her about, after he was finished here.

Teal'c, at least, seemed his usual "pillar of strength" self, which was always helpful when the Twins needed anchoring; nevertheless, Jack could tell that he was concerned. Part of him likely was compassionate toward the woman's ordeal, but another part was definitely assessing the situation and trying to determine whether she would pose a threat to the SGC once she woke. _Good luck, big guy. It's hard to guess how a total stranger will react to anything._

Jack returned his gaze to Dr. Fraiser; Janet was frowning but nodding, agreeing with O'Neill's assessment and eyeing Daniel with new respect. Oh, the doc knew Daniel was a smart guy, no question, but it wasn't often that she got to see his brilliant side - more often than not she was seeing whichever "side" of him was most in need of patching up at any given moment. She was in the middle of telling SG-1 that she would post a "guard" inside the room to watch over their patient until she woke, when the door to the isolation unit was yanked open.

"Doctor Fraiser! Please -" But the doc was already moving, with the four of them right behind her.

* * *

She slept uneasily, memories and dreams swirling around her in a chaos of imagery and sound. There was a kiss, and Kurshta's laughing black eyes, which shifted into a stranger's snarl of hatred. Hot water, steam rising gently from the surface, became the smoke of chimneys, then the baking heat of a pitch-dark room. Anaya was there, an arm around her shoulders as they shared the latest gossip, and then she was an old woman, a gap-toothed hag who clutched at her wrist in an impossibly strong grip. She tried to pull away, but the clawed hand never budged.

Then the shouting began.

"She defiled them! Look! Go and look! You can still see the glow from her influence!" "It's true, I can see it from here!" "Defiler! She defiled the holy stones!" "How dare you!"

The old woman wouldn't let go; her breath stank when she began to hiss curses, a steady stream of them in terrible, unending litany. Another hand in the surrounding throng lashed out to strike her cheek, the sudden impact of knuckles bringing tears to her eyes. When her vision cleared she looked frantically about her and saw faces that were closed to her at best, twisted with rage at worst.

"Defiler! Filth!"

Another hand wrapped itself around her upper arm as she stumbled forward, pushed from behind by the mob. The hag tugged at her on one side, and this giant fist on the other began to squeeze, and squeeze, until she felt her fingers begin to tingle with numbness. "Please, I didn't. . . I was only singing to them, what -"

"She admits it!" "Shut up! Shut up! Defiler!"

"But I'm not, don't call me, my name is -" "Kill her! Kill the defiler!"

The mob was howling around her now, her voice drowned in their rage, as they began to pummel and kick, spit and curse at her. Through it all, the two hands, one on her wrist and one on her arm, maintained their implacable grip. It was like being held by death - no, by the embodiment of hatred itself. She struggled, even as the sense came over her that fighting was useless; she knew what was coming next, the way one knows in nightmares what lurks behind every shuttered doorway. "Please. . ."

The town elder stood before them and the screaming faded to a deadly quiet. The mob parted, though hands still held her, no matter how she bucked and twisted.

The elder held up something in his hands, glinting silver in the light, and began to approach. His footsteps sounded in her mind like drumbeats, low and ominous, coming closer, closer. He opened his fingers, and the glinting resolved into a delicate mesh, with a single oval jewel suspended in the center.

The necklace. . . _no. Oh, no._

She fought harder against the hands that held her; she drew breath and tried to scream, but no sound came forth. No sound at all.

The nightmare shifted.

* * *

Daniel skidded to a stop in the doorway of the isolation unit, nearly running into Sam. Looking past her, he could see a nurse frantically trying to restrain "Jane Doe", attempting to pin her to the bed without hurting her. The woman was thrashing from side to side; the blankets had been flung off her upper body and were hanging halfway to the floor.

Dr. Fraiser charged into the fray, an orderly right behind her. "What happened?" she demanded, laying her weight across the woman's upper legs.

"I don't know! I was taking her vitals when -"

"Seizure?"

"Everything was normal!"

The doctor glared up at the orderly opposite her. "Find restraints, and 3 cc's of intravenous Propofol, now! Go!"

O'Neill stood nearest the bed, trying to dodge out of the way of the fleeing orderly. "Doc?"

"Not now, Colonel! I don't want to sedate her if I can help it, but if she doesn't calm down soon I'll have no choice, she's too weak to keep this up. Damn it!" Daniel started; Janet almost never swore that he'd heard of, unless she was off duty and talking about her ex-husband. "She's too weak for much more than a child's dose of sedative as it is!"

Just then the woman twisted out of the nurse's grasp and sat straight up in bed, eyes wide with terror but not really seeing anything around her. She took a deep breath, and Daniel watched as everyone around him flinched, bracing for a blood-curdling shriek. Then everyone, including Dr. Fraiser, looked up in shock when they were met with complete silence.

The woman took another deep breath. Her face was deep red and he could see her body trembling with the force of her screams, but there was no sound coming from her throat. She had stopped struggling, but her fists were clenched at her sides, and Daniel could see one arm turning dark from the blood pressure cuff, still wrapped around her upper arm. His eyes widened in realization.

"Oh, my God. Jack!"

But O'Neill had seen it too, and their eyes met for a split second before he was ordering, "Back off! Everybody, let her go - Doc, you too."

"Colonel O'Neill!"

"Trust me, Doc. I know what this is."

She opened her mouth to answer, then twisted as Daniel brushed past her, resting one hip on the bed and taking the woman's hands in his own. His voice had dropped to a low murmur. "Hey, hey, look at me, come on, right here, it's all right, would you get that cuff off of her, please, Nurse? You're all right, look at me," he said softly.

The Velcro made its customary ripping sound as the nurse peeled the cuff open, and the woman jumped. Daniel kept speaking, focusing his concentration on the woman who sat before him. He could barely hear Janet behind him.

"Care to explain why you're issuing orders in my infirmary, Colonel?"

"It's not what you think -"

Teal'c's rumbling tones interrupted. "Daniel Jackson experiences severe nightmares, occasionally while we are on a mission together. We have all seen similar behavior from him, though not frequently, wherein he remains disoriented for a few moments after waking."

The woman took another deep, shuddering breath, then blinked and seemed to see her surroundings for the first time. She focused on Daniel, a confused look on her face. He smiled gently, feeling her fists begin to unclench beneath his hands.

"Hey, hi there, my name is Daniel, you're safe here, don't be afraid, we're not going to hurt you, it was just a dream, you're all right now. . ."

She carefully pulled her left hand free of his, and he let it go. An idea struck him, and he began tracing his thumb across the knuckles of her other hand, careful of the IV lines. Daniel kept his voice low as he continued the litany of reassurances. He wasn't sure he was really reaching her yet; there had been plenty of nights when it had taken him an especially long time to surface from the clutches of his own dreams.

Her eyes never left his as her free hand came up, trembling, and touched the fingertips to his eyebrow, then traced down to his cheek. She rested her fingers there, the tips just touching his hair at his temple; then her eyes closed and she began to cry. Letting his words trail off, he slid forward on the bed and moved his free hand to touch her shoulder, carefully in case she wanted to pull away. Instead, she leaned toward him and buried her face in the hollow of his throat, still weeping silently.

* * *

Dr. Fraiser watched as the two sat that way for a long moment. Apparently, Daniel was a little bewildered about what to do next; he sat a bit stiffly, one hand covering hers and the other delicately cupping her shoulder. The woman, for her part, sagged against him in the universal posture of emotional exhaustion, or of absolute bereavement; oblivious to her surroundings, she didn't appear to move at all except for her breathing, uneven with tears. Only her right arm, held stiffly to one side by the padded cuff around her wrist, seemed to carry any tension.

As she glanced around the room, Janet saw that no one else was willing to break the tableau, either. The colonel and Teal'c wore solemn, subdued expressions, and Sam seemed to be wrestling with her own memories of sitting with another girl, not so long ago, who had been alone and bewildered and scared.

Nearly everyone was startled when her orderly rushed back into the room, carefully juggling the restraint webbing, the syringe of sedative, and various other hypodermic apparatus clutched in his hands. When he saw the two on the bed, he also stopped short, and raised his eyebrows at her curiously.

"Thank you for hurrying back with those," the doctor responded quietly, "but it looks like we won't need them after all." She shook her head and smiled ruefully. "On the other hand, I have a feeling a painkiller would be helpful in the next few minutes. She put up quite a fight in her. . . nightmare. . . and she's probably pretty sore now."

She turned back toward Colonel O'Neill and the rest of her audience, gently but firmly steering them toward the door of the isolation unit. "If you'll excuse us, gentlemen, we're going to need some privacy for a few moments, and after that I suspect we're going to fall asleep for the night." She looked over her shoulder for a moment, adding, "Actually, Major Carter, I'd like you to stay if you don't mind."

Carter looked to O'Neill, who shrugged and said, "Fine by me. We'll be outside, Doc."

Janet stepped to the window and closed the blinds, then approached the bed, moving carefully so as not to startle her patient. Touching Dr. Jackson on the shoulder, she murmured, "Daniel, you too. Time for you to go."

Both of them looked up; two sets of blue eyes gazed at her intently, one confused, haggard, and puffy-eyed, and the other merely confused. "I don't think we should leave her alone right now -"

"I have no intention of leaving her alone, Dr. Jackson, but you need to step outside. I've asked Sam to take over your spot."

"What? I don't -"

Janet closed her eyes for a moment and gathered her professional dignity about her. "Dr. Jackson. I'm not trying to insult you, but my patient is a woman. You're a man." She paused, waiting for her unspoken meaning to register. _Any second now. . ._

"Well, um, thank you for noticing, but. . . Oh. Oh! Oh, right. Um." He slid off the bed, blushing slightly, and started backing toward the door. "I'll just," he pointed over his shoulder at the door, "I'll um, I'll be outside, if, um, if you need anything."

"Thank you, Dr. Jackson." Janet struggled to keep her smile within the bounds of professionalism, but it wasn't easy, especially when she caught Sam out of the corner of her eye, fighting an identical grin. Daniel finally bumped into the door, turned, and left, and she shook her head in amusement, sharing a look with Sam before turning to attend to her charge.

* * *

"I can't believe it," Jack was muttering to himself, "I just can not believe it." He was pacing the infirmary just outside the isolation unit, hands on his hips, the fingers of one hand drumming irritably against his belt.

"I can not believe that we've got a, a refugee in there, who we can't send home because - in addition to all the other fun stuff we've found out about - she's not able to tell us where home is. And why is that? Why? Because she's a mute, that's why! I can not believe this!"

Teal'c, in contrast to O'Neill's agitation, stood motionless nearby, in a position that suggested he was prepared to stay there all night, or even all month, if necessary, until Dr. Fraiser came out to them. He was like an anchor, or a nucleus, around which O'Neill orbited, only his eyes moving as he followed the colonel's restless pacing across the infirmary floor and listened impassively to O'Neill's grumbling. When his warrior-brother had completed three full laps and added no new phrases or colorful invective, Teal'c spoke.

"O'Neill. Your agitation in this matter serves no useful purpose. If it is your plan to assist this woman, you would be better served in considering how to do so."

"Oh, I'm considering, T-Man; I'm considering that she can't talk! How is Daniel supposed to do his thing?" Just then the door opened, and Daniel stepped out, blushing for some reason. "Daniel, how are you supposed to do your thing?"

"My - my 'thing'?" he asked, startled.

"You know, make nice with the aliens. Talk to her. How can you do that if she can't talk back?"

Daniel flashed his "shy professor" half-smile. "Oh, well, talking is easy, actually; it's, ah, it's listening that will be the challenge."

Jack turned to face Teal'c, his tone one of overtaxed patience. "And now, Teal'c, Daniel has decided to develop a sense of humor. I would love a genuine answer to my question, Teal'c; Daniel, do you think you could give me a genuine answer?"

"I'm actually not too concerned about this, Jack, and I wasn't joking to begin with." He shrugged. "Most of the aliens we've met haven't spoken a word to us - not at first, anyway. We've had to share writings, or come up with signs or gestures, establish some kind of common ground before we could make any progress."

O'Neill, his face thoughtful, mused, "I believe I recall an especially memorable chicken impression, our first night on Abydos. . ."

"Yes. Well. All I'm saying is that I haven't given up yet, by any means. I mean, we don't know for sure if she is unable to speak, and even if that 's the case, I've barely begun to -"

"To dig into your bag of tricks?"

"Mm. Something like that, yes."

Jack considered for a moment. "So, for now, what do we do?"

It was Teal'c who answered, with a hint of a smile on his face: "We continue to wait, O'Neill."

"I hate waiting."

Teal'c watched as the colonel began to pace once more. "So we have seen, O' Neill - many times."

* * *

The woman called Jane Doe, known to some of the strangers around her as "Danielle", watched the remaining women in the room intently, trembling slightly and sniffling from time to time in the final aftermath of her nightmare. It was easy to tell, now, how weak her recent ordeal had left her. Fighting free from her dream had taken almost all her energy, and she felt as if she were one enormous head-to-toe ache, all her sore spots and wounds joining in chorus thanks to her struggles. The fear itself was nearly exhausting; unfortunately, there were strange people here, and it might not be safe to lie back down just yet. _Even if it is,_ she thought, _I need to learn more about the latest key change, before I can play along._

She swallowed once, trying to control her breathing, and studied the three women around her. Two were in white coats, one with very dark skin and wrinkles at her eyes, the other fair-skinned and very short. She carried an air of confidence and authority, even as she ran a small hand soothingly over the woman's hair. _Ugh,_ she thought, noticing for the first time that her hair was hanging loosely about her shoulders in tangled, oily locks. _When was the last time I had any kind of bath? Did they scrape all that mud off me, or just dump a bucket over my head?_

The smaller woman before her smiled reassuringly, her large brown eyes filled with what the woman really, really hoped was sincere kindness. She spoke, but the words made no sense. The tone of her voice seemed genuine as far as "Danielle" could read it, but the sounds were complete gibberish. _She could just have cheerfully declared that I was to be executed, for all I know. Oh, wonderful._

The woman swallowed again, recognizing the signs of impending hysteria. _Come on, calm down, think for a minute. . . Compared to the last place I can remember, this is an improvement. Look - no mud, light to see by, and people._

 _And they're not even attacking me,_ she answered herself, a little giddily. _Wheee, remind me to throw myself a festival!_

She forced herself to focus, as Brown Eyes - easily shorter than she was herself - spoke more words, and seemed to beckon the third stranger over with a tilt of her head. This one was tall, with blonde hair cut short, bright blue eyes, and wore a snug-fitting black shirt over odd, dull green, baggy trousers.

As she sat down, Brown Eyes touched Dark Shirt's shoulder and spoke again, then touched her own chest and said something else. There was a peculiar emphasis there - was that an introduction?

Under the small woman's direction, the other woman in white gathered the tangled bedding from the floor and stepped out. Meanwhile, Brown Eyes examined the tubes coming out of her skin, and seemed relieved at what she saw; however, "Danielle" could feel the sting where she had rubbed her wrist raw, pulling against the restraint.

There was a scattered assortment of strange items on the small table near the bed. Brown Eyes peeled open the cuff, which made that odd tearing sound again, then picked up a small ball of white fluff from the table and soaked it in some sort of brown liquid. She looked up and said more words. _Courteous. Even if I can't tell what she's saying, she's at least trying to tell me what's happening. If I had to guess. . ._

Those delicate hands dabbed gently at the inside of the woman's wrist, working quickly. _I guessed correctly. Ouch._ "Danielle" flinched and hissed through her teeth, but didn't pull away; Dark Shirt was murmuring in a low voice at her side, which actually did seem to help.

The small, brown-eyed woman, now known as "Healer", was speaking again, a longer flow of meaningless sounds in a reassuring tone. She pulled a roll of gauze-ribbon from the little drawer in the table and tore off a short length, wrapping the abraded skin carefully as she spoke.

Healer glanced over at Dark Shirt as she spoke, and the tall blonde leaned over and did something just out of sight. "Danielle" twisted stiffly as the top half of the bed began to bend behind her. _What under the sky is that?_ Healer smiled again and moved around behind her to unfasten the loose smock, and then guided her to lie back on the bed. _Oh, that feels better. The healers at home would love to have beds like this. Will it stay bent while I sleep?_

Healer moved her newly bandaged wrist, until her hand was resting on the pillow by her head; then she slid the fabric of the smock aside and began to gently palpate the area around "Danielle's" cracked ribs. While it hurt, nothing felt out of place, and the healer seemed satisfied as well by what she found.

The older woman in white re-entered the room carrying a stack of neatly folded bed linens, and moved to stand near the foot of the bed. It sounded as though she asked Healer a question. _I think my Healer is the leader here, and the other one must be an assistant of some kind. So what does that make Dark Shirt?_

Healer was talking with Dark Shirt now, and the taller woman was sliding off the side of the bed, squeezing her shoulder one last time before stepping toward the door. She asked a question, and Healer gave a long response, still talking quietly but shrugging her shoulders at one point, gesturing with her hands, and nodding her head - apparently explaining something, probably talking about her patient.

After the exchange, Dark Shirt nodded and slipped out of the room, pulling the door shut behind her. Healer gestured to her assistant, and turned toward the bed once more.

* * *

The three men looked up in unison as Sam stepped out of the isolation unit. "So, what's going on?" the colonel asked.

Sam ran a hand through her hair as she answered. "According to Dr. Fraiser, so far it looks like she had a bad fright, but nothing more. Apparently she was having a nightmare, like Daniel thought, but then when she woke up she was in strange surroundings, and partly restrained besides. Janet says something like that would be enough to trigger a panic attack in almost anyone."

Daniel said nothing but nodded once, folding his arms across his stomach and sharing a glance with Jack, who raised his eyebrows in an expression of agreement. "Ah, yeah. Been there, done that - you know." He shifted his gaze back to Carter. "Anything else?"

She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, saying, "Not much, sir. She's calm now, and alert enough that Janet's not worried about a repeat incident, although she did say she was going to follow your suggestion to keep someone posted in there overnight." Shrugging, Sam went on, "She and Nurse Jefferson were going to finish the examination and let her get some sleep. If I may, sir, it is late, and we have a mission briefing tomorrow. . ."

O'Neill nodded. "Can't have you kids staying up late on a school night, can we?" He smiled and headed toward the door, towing Daniel beside him by virtue of an arm thrown across his shoulders, and she followed as Teal'c fell into step beside her. As the four parted ways in the corridor, Sam could hear the colonel's words fading behind her, "Speaking of, Dannyboy, what were you still doing in your office at this time of night, anyway?"

The elevator doors closed behind her, cutting off Daniel's reply.

* * *

Dr. Fraiser was more than a little encouraged by the woman's responses, once she had calmed down from her nightmare. The rush of adrenaline was beginning to wear off, if she was any judge, but the patient's gaze remained sharp, alert, and in her opinion almost certainly intelligent. There was no telling whether she understood a word any of them said, but as a doctor, Janet wasn't about to demean her patient by talking over and around her, as if she were a set of tasks to perform instead of a living person.

"This next part will be pretty uncomfortable, and probably embarrassing, but you've done very well so far. I promise, as soon as I'm finished here we'll get these fresh blankets on you, and leave you to get some rest, okay?" There was no response, of course, apart from the studious, wary regard on the woman's face.

Moving slowly, the doctor gently guided her patient's legs apart, trying to keep eye contact as much as possible. She briefly wished she had had time to put on latex gloves before dashing in here, then put the thought aside and, as delicately as possible, examined the woman's genitals for signs of injury from the catheter. She heard the intake of breath and glanced upward, but the woman only reached for the bed railings, gripping them anxiously.

"Almost done, almost done, you're doing fine. . ." Hopefully the poor thing wouldn't be traumatized by the experience; Janet kept her sigh of regret strictly internal. Knowing that this part of the examination was necessary - as necessary as putting iodine on the patient's wrist had been - did not change the understanding that this woman had to cope with all the fear and confusion of being in completely unfamiliar surroundings, in addition to the pain and weakness of her injuries. It was also very likely that she wouldn't understand any explanation that they could give her.

Finishing the exam, Janet stood, and felt the weight of her responsibilities as a doctor settle about her shoulders. It was hard, now and again, taking those responsibilities as seriously as she did; her professional detachment warred with compassion, and some days the conflict was more strongly felt than others.

Nurse Jefferson had set the linens on the bed and was standing behind her, offering a pocket-sized bottle of hand sanitizer with one hand and pulling a box of tissues from the bedside drawer with the other. Dr. Fraiser glanced at her gratefully, and spoke to both of them as she cleaned up.

"It looks like there is no damage, but I wouldn't be surprised if you're tender tomorrow morning. That's nothing to worry about, and it should be short lived - as you regain your strength we'll be able to get you out of bed, and you won't need the catheter anymore. Really, your recovery so far has been excellent. I'm very pleased." She turned to the nurse, and continued, "Let's get the sheets over her, then I want to show her how to use the call button; tomorrow we'll remove the glucose drip and see how she handles a light diet."

She turned to help the nurse with the bed linens, saw that the patient was fighting to stay awake, and amended her decision. Squeezing her shoulder gently, Janet said, "We're finished for tonight, hon; you get some rest, and I'll see you in the morning."

By the time she and Nurse Jefferson smoothed the blanket over her, the woman was sound asleep.

* * *

The next morning, General Hammond strode into the briefing room from his office to find SG-1 already assembled and waiting for him. Carter and O' Neill moved to rise as he stepped through the doorway, but he waved them back to their seats. "As you were," he said, taking his place at the head of the table.

Once Hammond was settled, he eyed them all carefully for a moment, gauging their moods before finally speaking. "Today's meeting was intended to be a mission briefing for your upcoming survey of P-6442, with your 'go' originally scheduled for this afternoon. However, our 'unexpected guest' from P2X-357 has necessitated a change in plans. Effective immediately, I am reassigning SG-12 to perform the survey instead."

Major Carter's eyes were wide as she turned to her commanding officer. "Sir? Why didn't you tell us about this last night?"

The colonel retorted, "That would be because I just found out about it myself, Carter." Propping his elbows on the table, he leaned forward and looked at Hammond. "General, out of. . . idle curiosity. . . what do you have planned for us to do instead? I mean, not that we wouldn't just love collecting rocks on some other uninhabited planet. . ."

Hammond leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his stomach. "As was stated in SG-4's debrief yesterday, first contact is your team's area of expertise, Colonel. We have a woman from an unknown planet currently recovering in our infirmary, and your team has already been involved in the effort to try and determine her origins, as well as whether or not she represents a threat to the rest of this base." He glanced around the table once more, and continued, "As I understand it from Dr. Fraiser, your team has also recently had an opportunity to meet her in person, and to assist her in acclimating to her new surroundings. Is that correct?"

Daniel rolled his pen between his fingers and said slowly, "Ah, General, those were kind of unusual circumstances. I, we, didn't expect to see her at all then, only to speak with Dr. Fraiser about SG-4's latest findings."

"Are you saying you are not interested in learning more about this woman, Dr. Jackson?" the general asked, his eyebrows rising. _Unlikely,_ he thought to himself with a small smile.

The young man sat straight up in his haste to correct himself, to Hammond's private (and O'Neill's very visible) amusement. "Oh - no, sir! Nothing like that, I was just - I mean - ah, Jack?"

"We got lucky?"

"Yes. No! I mean, well, it was strictly a coincidence, General. We just happened to be there; I'm not so sure that you should reassign us just on the strength of one. . . chance encounter, that's all."

"Nevertheless, Dr. Jackson, I have made my decision. Dr. Fraiser informs me that "Jane Doe" is still in isolation, so you won't be able to begin conversation with her until she is moved. After that point, you and Major Carter can study the equipment that SG-4 brought with them - assuming that it belongs to the woman and she gives you her permission."

Hammond stood, and Carter and O'Neill rose to their feet immediately. "Now then, as there is no further need for a mission briefing, SG-1 is dismissed. Colonel, a word, please."

The two men waited until the rest of the team had filed out. "Sir?"

"I wanted to make clear that this reassignment is in no way to be considered a punishment, Colonel, nor does it reflect my opinion of your ability to carry out the survey on P-6442. On the contrary, you and the rest of the team performed admirably while the SGC was under quarantine."

O'Neill rocked back on his heels, listening carefully. "Thank you, sir."

"I am aware that both Major Carter and Dr. Jackson are working overtime, to try and stay ahead of the backlog of material they each are studying; your missions over the past two months have been very productive." Hammond looked at his second-in-command and waited.

"Ah. . . yes, sir, they have."

The general moved to lean idly against the briefing room table. "Frankly, Colonel, I've been concerned that those two were going to burn themselves out in the near future, and knowing them, neither one would even realize they were spreading themselves too thin until it was too late." He folded his arms and looked O'Neill right in the eye. "I have been looking for an excuse to give them both some much-needed time on base, to get caught up with their work, without giving my superiors or Kinsey's vultures an opportunity to accuse the SGC of wasting taxpayer money, again."

Jack blinked once, fitting the pieces together mentally, then looked at the general appreciatively.

Hammond's sly, satisfied smile finally came to the surface. Regarding O' Neill smugly, he took a breath and said, "Thanks to this "Jane Doe", I have a legitimate assignment to offer SG-1, that just happens to keep you from going off-world for a while. With any luck, you all will have enough time to catch up on your work, and just maybe recharge your batteries at the same time. Reassigning your team is the most elegant solution I've seen to a problem in months."

O'Neill turned the idea over in his head, nodded once slowly, thought about it some more, and nodded again. His own smile broadening, he said, "I guess that's why they pay you the big bucks, sir," and at Hammond's nod of dismissal, he tucked his hands into his pockets and sauntered out the door.

* * *

The woman sat in her bed, idly twirling a hairbrush in one hand and watching through the window as healers and their assistants roamed back and forth, tending people and conferring among themselves. She had recovered enormously in the past few "days", enough so that she was finally beginning to feel impatient to get up and explore her surroundings. _My ankle won't heal any faster just because I wish it,_ she thought to herself. _I suppose it's just as well. I still don't know these people very well at all, and with the luck I've had until now. . ._

As far as she could tell, there was no source of natural light anywhere within her view out the window. The passage of days was marked by the healers, who dimmed the lights over their patients' beds before leaving and taking most of their assistants with them. After several hours, the number of healers moving about would increase, the assistants would brighten the lights again, and food would be served to those well enough to eat on their own.

The woman was pleased to be one of those. The small, brown-eyed healer had observed her closely while she gulped down the hot broth they had first brought - she hadn't been able to stop her toes from curling in ecstasy, both from the salty goodness and the way the warmth spread out from her stomach. How long had it been since she had had anything other than water?

When it became clear that the new foods would not make her sick, the healer had carefully removed one of the needle-and-tube arrangements from her arm. The assistants continued to bring her small portions throughout each day, until it seemed that she was munching constantly. Some of the food was familiar - bread and cheese were the same almost everywhere, after all - and some was new. Most of it was very good, except for the berries that the assistants called "re-grep" and "wai-grep", which had a sweet taste but a texture that made her gag when she tried to swallow them.

Still, she couldn't help but chuckle to herself every time she sipped at a bowl of the broth. _No matter what new planet the Ancients' Portal reveals, if there are humans on it, they have hot soup for their sick - and it tastes the same on every world, don't ask me how._

At some point, one of the assistants had gotten the idea to start telling her the names of the things around her; the others had caught on, so that now in addition to eating throughout the day ( _I'm going to turn into a ribbon-grazer at this rate,_ she thought), she spent much of her time awake in a light memory-trance, absorbing the words to their language as quickly as possible. At "night" before she slept, she would practice the names, rolling their shapes around on her tongue and trying to guess whether she was pronouncing them correctly. Already, she was able to pick a few words out of the ongoing babble around her.

And yesterday, finally, she had gotten the wires unglued from her chest and both the remaining tubes removed, and she had gotten much closer to having a decent bath - _though I would still sell off my xirula for a good, long soak in a hot pool!_ She turned the brush over in her hands once more, before setting back to work on the tangled mess her hair had become.

 _At least I have a good idea of the tune, now_ , she reminded herself, pulling the brush through brown hair that would reach her shoulder-blades when she was done. She tipped her head to one side, timing the strokes of the brush to match each thought.

 _My original mission was to explore._ Pull. Frown. _On my original mission I was as popular as an off-rhythm drummer at a dance circle._

Pull. _I can keep exploring here instead, or I can go home with what I've learned and come back later._ Pull - wince at a tangle, tease it apart with her fingers. _Either way, I need to heal before I can do much of anything._ Pull. _While I'm healing, I can learn the language these people speak - and while I'm doing that, figure out why they've refused to take off the necklace._ Pull. Sigh. _And, admit it, I don't want to go home still wearing it - as bad as it is now, I don't think I could stand sharing this pain with anyone I care about._ Pull. _Not until it's over, anyway._

Finish with this side; tip her head to start the other. _I wish I could just ask the healers. I wish the healers had more time to visit._ Pull. _I wish I knew the way to the Ancients' Portal._ Pull - set the hairbrush down and wipe her eyes. _I really, really wish I would stop crying every time I think of going home._

* * *

Several hours later, her light doze was interrupted by the tiny Healer walking into her room smiling, with two assistants behind her. One of them, a real giant of a man, was pushing an odd contraption, some kind of chair with wheels on either side and handles in the back, like a pushcart. The other was carrying a small bundle of cloth, which she shook out to reveal a set of shirt and pants in a pretty blue-green color, with a heavy, knee-length white robe to go over them.

The woman assistant helped her to dress while the Healer talked to her, and she strained to catch the words - something about going out? Oh, wait, those words made sense; usually "change" was the word they used for fresh sheets, but it sounded like they had said she would be moving to a different bed. Sure enough, once the robe was belted, the man put an arm around her shoulders and began to gently guide her off the mattress. _That explains the chair, then,_ she thought to herself.

Then she was standing, for the first time since she had been brought here; no, it had been even longer, she realized, recalling that she had been too badly hurt to stand when she had woken from the beating the mob had given her. She blinked away a moment of light-headedness and tunnel vision, leaning one-footed against the assistant while he held her upright. The brief thought, _He's really huge!_ , flitted across her mind, and she couldn't help the half-smile that surfaced as she wondered whether he'd be any fun to dance with. _You can't even walk right now, much less dance, dizzy woman,_ she scolded herself. _Take the tempo slowly until you can play the tune the way it deserves._

Nevertheless, as soon as she felt steady on her. . . foot. . . she couldn't resist tipping her head back and batting her eyelashes at the assistant with a grin, and was pleased to startle a laugh out of all three of them. She couldn't follow the commentary that resulted, but she could read the tone well enough; it was good to know that a little flirting would not get her into trouble in this culture.

With their help, she hopped carefully away from the bed until there was room to bring the wheeled chair over, then turned and let them ease her back into it. The older woman stepped over to open the door to her room, and her giant stood behind her and pushed, making her feel a bit like goods in a cart as she glided through the door and into the larger room outside. She was hoisted bodily into a new bed; after a few moments of adjusting and settling, the older assistant brought her a hot bowl of soup, then left her with a parting smile and a pat on the arm.

Blowing on the steaming broth, the woman looked around her with interest. This room held about eight beds, two of them partially surrounded by curtains. She could see doorways at either end of the room, one apparently leading to an identical room and the other, as far as she could guess, opening onto a busy corridor. Everything still followed the rigid, rectangular form of her private chamber; the only difference was that the blankets were a smoky blue-gray instead of tan, and there were more people moving about. _With any luck, I'll be able to pick up the language much more quickly, at least._

She looked down to keep an eye on things as she took a spoonful of soup, savoring the salty broth. After a few mouthfuls, she looked up again and saw a man, definitely not dressed like a healer, standing shyly at the foot of her bed.

* * *

Daniel had made slow but steady progress in his office in the intervening days, editing reports from previous missions and trying not to feel too bored. _After all,_ he mused, _how often do I really get the opportunity to catch up on all these back-burner projects?_ Jack had explained the general's line of reasoning to them not long after their briefing, and Daniel couldn't fault it - it was just difficult to dive gratefully into the work on his desk, when he was so impatient to discover what secrets "Jane Doe" might be able to tell him, if he could only talk to her.

He was just about to dig out a translation that had been set aside a month ago, when he'd received an email from Dr. Fraiser that "Jane Doe" was being moved out of isolation today. It had taken no time at all to decide whether to drop what he was doing and come see her; in fact, he'd left his office so quickly that he'd had to return to pick up the legal pad and pen he'd left behind.

He stood now in the infirmary doorway, watching as the woman was wheeled to her new bed. With her fingers, she smoothed shoulder-length brown hair back into a tail, clutching it at the nape of her neck while she looked around. Her eyes seemed large in a delicately boned face, and were taking in her surroundings with undisguised curiosity. The bulky bathrobe, coupled with the fading bruise that blurred across one eye socket and into her temple, gave her a childlike, vulnerable air, as did the ease with which the orderly lifted her into bed.

Daniel stopped for a moment to clear his thoughts, making sure that he would not impose any assumptions or bias on their interview. He'd asked Dr. Fraiser to inform him as soon as "Jane Doe" was moved out of isolation, but he'd also specifically requested that she not tell him anything about the woman's behavior, so that he could learn as much as he could about her culture on her own terms, not his. Anthropology was one science that had no room in it for prejudice - success was impossible, otherwise.

Luckily, he didn't need to remind himself to be non-threatening. _Sam was right,_ he realized; _what Jack calls "making nice" is so much more than what I do. It's who I am._ He approached the bed cautiously, taking in details about her appearance as he waited for her to notice him.

At a guess, the woman was in her mid-twenties; apart from an occasional wince when her ribs pained her, she moved easily, and her hair had no silver in it that he could see. It flowed back over her shoulders, except for one narrow braid on the right side of her face, which swung gently and brushed her cheek as she moved. Hands that appeared more capable than beautiful, but not rough, cupped the bowl and spoon in a way that suggested she was familiar with both implements. Apart from the bruises he could see, her skin was clear, with no obvious scarring, neither from disease nor deliberate, ceremonial markings.

She looked up then, surprised but not frightened, and Daniel offered her a tentative smile. "Um. . . hi." Her eyes were very blue, he noticed distantly.

After tilting her head to one side and giving him a long, appraising look, the woman set her bowl of soup to one side and folded her uninjured leg beneath her. She beckoned to the empty space on the mattress, her meaning clear.

"Ah, thanks," he said, sitting down carefully. "My name is Daniel, I'm. . . you. . . don't understand a word I'm saying, do you." She held his gaze steadily the entire time, attentive to the point of scrutiny; it was a little unnerving. _All right, let's go back to square one,_ he thought.

"Square one" with an unknown culture: Stick to universal gestures. He tapped his chest, said "Daniel. Daniel," then opened his hand toward her in invitation.

The woman sat straight up in surprise, her expression caught somewhere between bewilderment and frustration. She laid one hand against her own chest; then her fingers crept up to grasp the jewel of the necklace, nestled in the hollow of her throat.

"Um, that's, that's a necklace," he said, gesturing toward the jewel. "Necklace? I don't. . . I don't understand." He set down the pen and notepad, and put both hands on his chest this time. "Daniel." Eyebrows raised, he looked at her again, gave the "invitation" sign once more. "You?"

Still grasping the necklace in one hand, she brought her other up to indicate it. _Some kind of emphasis, then; maybe it's important, but. . ._ "I don't know what you mean."

The woman seemed to recognize the confusion on his face, and her own expression grew more distressed in response. She blinked several times, her breath quickening; leaning forward, she touched her throat, then the necklace. She was pulling at it now, the mesh beginning to dig into the skin on the back of her neck.

"Hey, it's okay, don't - you're going to hurt yourself - I'm sorry," Daniel said quickly, his hands covering hers. "I'm sorry, shh, it's okay. . . I'm trying to understand, I just- "

"Tsst!" The woman hissed, interrupting him, and grabbed his hands before he could pull away. Her eyes searching his frantically, she carefully laid his fingers against the hollow of his own throat. With her other hand, she let go of the necklace and gestured at him, impatiently.

"Um, you. . . you want me to talk? Okay. . ." Daniel looked at her, completely at a loss but willing to go along. _What is she trying to tell me?_

She let go of his fingers. She touched his throat briefly, then hers; then, holding her hand straight up, she shook it lightly, making the fingertips quiver rapidly for a moment. Looking at him intently, she repeated the gesture, touching his throat then quivering her hand in the space between them.

"Ah, vibration. . . voice?" He could feel his Adam's apple bobbing under the skin as he spoke.

She left her "voice" hand in the air; carefully, with her other hand, she touched the necklace, shaking the jewel at him and watching to be sure he understood. With that hand, she made a large "C" in the air, as if she were holding an invisible coffee mug. Jaw clenched, she quivered the fingers of her "voice" hand again - then attacked with the "C" of her other hand, clamping down tightly on her "voice". Her face contorted as though she were fighting back a snarl.

"Wait. . . wait, wait-wait-wait - you mean - you do! You -" Daniel was stunned. _How could we not have seen this?!_ "Holy. . . Hannah." Leaping up from the bed, he grabbed the woman by the shoulders. "I'll be - I need Sam. No - Dr. Fraiser! Then Sam. Right! I'll be right - you - wait here!" He almost tripped over his own feet in his haste to reach Dr. Fraiser's office.

* * *

Ten minutes later, the woman found her bed surrounded by people, all talking excitedly, much too fast for her to follow even if she had understood all the words. The Healer was there, as was the young man who called himself "Dañil", who she remembered had helped to break her free of that terrible nightmare a few nights ago. On the bed with her crouched another woman whom she recognized from that night as well, whom Dañil introduced as "Sam".

Sam was bent forward, practically breathing in her ear and shining a bright light at her throat, studying the necklace she still wore. The woman held herself very still, chin up and eyes flicking warily across to Dañil and the Healer every few moments. So many things made sense now; she had thought at first that these people were refusing to take the necklace off, perhaps because they wanted to continue her punishment, or to use it as some kind of bartering leverage to make her do what they wanted once she recovered. It was hard to believe that they simply hadn't known what it was for; yet Dañil clearly had had no idea, even though she'd thought at first that he was taunting her inability to speak.

Well, they knew now, and Sam - some kind of technician, perhaps - was intent on removing it as soon as she finished looking her over. _Which will be soon, I hope - that light is hot._ In the meantime, she sat as still as she could, nervously clutching the writing pad and stylus that Dañil had left behind and willing her ribs not to twinge too painfully for the next few moments.

* * *

Carter slid from the bed, smiling reassuringly at "Jane Doe" and slipping her flashlight into her back pocket. "This is like nothing I've ever seen before," she began, then stopped and grinned at Daniel. How many times over the years had they said that to one another? His eyebrows went up, and she knew he understood what she meant.

She shook her head and went on, "That 'jewel' has some kind of matrix embedded in it, and I thought I could see a similar one in the other setting - the little jewel at the back of her neck. The angle isn't right to get a better view of how it works, but it would certainly make sense that there's some kind of, I don't know, sound-triggered or vibration-triggered mechanism in there, that could interfere with her ability to speak."

Fraiser looked up at her, eyes fierce. "How soon can you get it off my patient?" she asked, clearly making an effort not to demand an answer. Sam shrugged and chose not to take it personally; any good doctor was protective of the people under his or her care, and Janet was one of the best. She would likely kick herself for a week, for not realizing that there was a connection between the odd piece of jewelry and the young woman's inability to speak - but who would have expected such a connection in the first place?

"That depends, unfortunately," Sam replied. "The necklace fits close enough to the skin that I'd rather not just take a pair of wire-cutters to it - I'd be running the risk of really hurting her if I slipped. And that assumes that this. . . mesh. . . is ordinary metal, anyway, something that can be cut. If the necklace is meant to be some kind of restraint, or even a kind of torture device," she grimaced at the word, "then there might be something in place to prevent tampering."

Daniel mimicked her grimace and asked, "What, you're saying this thing has some kind of booby-trap that will go off, if we try to take it off the wrong way?"

Sam spread her hands and looked at them both. "I'm saying I don't know, and I don't want to take any chances that I might do more harm than good." She looked over her shoulder at the woman, who sat watching their every move. "I'm going to do everything I can to figure out how to take this thing off, but from what I understand she nearly died a week ago on P2X-357. I'd rather not do anything else to hurt her."

Janet folded her arms and frowned, taking a tense breath in through her nose. "What do you need from me, then?" she asked.

Sam tucked fingers through her belt loops distractedly, replying, "Well, it would be great if you told me she was well enough to come up to the lab. I don't want to do anything unless she's up to it, but if I could get her into the lab I might be able to get more information about the matrix in those jewels."

Fraiser thought for a moment before shaking her head. "No, she's not quite ready to get out of bed for any length of time. I might be willing to let you bring some of your instruments down here. . ."

"No," said the major, "that won't work either. The equipment I would need to really analyze this thing just isn't portable." She shrugged helplessly.

Daniel held up one finger tentatively, and when he had their attention, said, "What about MRI?"

Both women exchanged a surprised glance, then the doctor replied, "Now that you mention it, the necklace didn't really interfere with the scan we performed when she was first brought in; I certainly would expect it to have blocked, say, an X-ray. It's possible that MRI would tell us something more about the necklace, if we adjusted the focus to scan it instead of her internal organs."

"So," Daniel continued, "maybe you could arrange to run a scan, and Sam, maybe you could see whether there are things, ah, equipment in your lab, stuff that is portable enough to bring down here?" He glanced back and forth between the two women, uncertainly. "I mean, as a temporary solution, until she has recovered enough to be released. . . would that work?"

Janet smiled. "That would work very well for me, as long as we can find a way to explain to Danielle what it is we're doing. But that does raise a second question: Once she is ready to be released from the infirmary, where will she be released to?"

"I think I overheard the colonel talking with General Hammond about that," said Sam. "They were thinking of giving her a room, similar to Teal'c's, until we return her to her home planet; either that or a VIP suite, if they' re not in use, to make her feel a little more comfortable. You might want to ask him about that."

"Either of those is an acceptable solution, as far as I'm concerned," the doctor replied, beginning to move away from the bed. "I'll see if the MRI chamber is open today, and if not I'll schedule a slot for her; in the meantime, Sam, go ahead and look over your instruments, but please call and clear anything you plan to bring in with you."

The major followed, a smile on her face. "No problem, Janet. One question, though. . ."

Behind them, still at the woman's bedside, Daniel raised his voice. "Dr. Fraiser?"

Janet turned, and Sam could see an odd expression on his face, somewhere between confused and annoyed. "Yes, Dr. Jackson?"

"Did. . . did you just call her 'Danielle'?" he asked, brow furrowed.

To Sam's delight, her friend the doctor actually blushed.

* * *

Daniel returned his attention to the woman on the bed. _'Danielle', indeed,_ he thought sourly. He could see immediately what the joke was about, although he didn't think it was really funny. _If she'd had gray hair, I bet they wouldn't have started calling her 'Jackie'._

His unwitting namesake had relaxed her posture a bit, and was now reclined against the pillows, examining the pen and pad he'd accidentally left behind during his rush to find Dr. Fraiser a few minutes ago. She'd managed to figure out how to "click" the pen, and was now carefully drawing a dot with it on one fingertip, holding the ballpoint in front of her nose to study it intently.

For the briefest of instants, he was reminded of Sha're; the way she'd been fascinated by the pens he'd kept with him on Abydos, thinking them wondrous, even magical; the way she'd smiled up at him in delight. . .

Daniel shook his head quickly, forcing the thought away. Sitting down on the bed, he said, "Um, that's. . . that's called a 'pen', it - 'pen'. Here - may I?" He held his hand out and waited, while the woman, who had gone cross-eyed for a moment, blinked her vision clear and smiled shyly at him. _Sha're smiled like that,_ he remembered with a pang. She smiled so much! She used to laugh when he couldn't do things that she thought of as simple, and grin impishly as she told jokes about him with the rest of the women; her teeth would flash white in the darkness when they made love. . . _Enough!_

He turned his head, shutting his eyes tight to will the memories away; he snatched the pen away when she put it in his hand, not seeing the way the woman's smile vanished abruptly as he picked up the legal pad. Releasing a deep breath, he scribbled his name down quickly and turned toward her again.

"Here, maybe this - my name is Daniel. You see?" he said, tapping his pen against the paper. "This is 'D', um, dih. . . ahh, nnn, eee, ehh, lll. . . Daaan-iell." He looked up at her and couldn't help flashing a half-smile at her, his moment of pain forgotten. "Daniel. That's me."

She gave him a strange look for a moment, as if trying to puzzle out some riddle, before glancing at the paper he held out to her. Taking the pen, she touched it to the letter "D" and looked at him questioningly. When he repeated the "dih" sound, she quickly swirled something under the letter. Touching the "A" she repeated the look, and proceeded one at a time to write some kind of character underneath his good old Roman letters as he sounded t hem out for her.

Daniel craned his neck to see the shapes right side up. Her characters seemed unfamiliar, _though of course that could be due to the quirks of individual handwriting,_ he mused. _What am I saying? Her people have a writing system and she's literate in it - this is excellent!_

On the next line below his name, the woman swiftly re-wrote the characters, shifting the vowels to rest above each consonant; then, tilting her head to one side, she underlined the "N" and "I" of his name, wrote a new character, and re-wrote his name using it instead. If he was reading it correctly, "Daniel" became. . . "Danel"? "Dañil", perhaps?

While he pondered the significance of the new character, the woman jumped two lines down on the paper, and a new set of characters curled into being, each spaced a little apart from the others. Under them, she carefully copied an "A", "E", and "L", leaving blank spaces; finally, she looked back up at him, chewing on her bottom lip apprehensively.

"You - um, I can try and guess these, but -" He was interrupted by the woman taking his hand and pressing the pen into it. A breathy "t" burst from her lips.

"What - oh! 'T', right, what was I - um." He glanced back down at the paper, looked up at her again. "Where, which one do I - this?" Her fingertips brushed the first character, and he wrote "T" under it. "Where else?" Her hand moved to caress the fourth character, and she looked up again. With her teeth on her bottom lip, she blew out gently.

"Is that. . . um, is that 'F'? Fff," he said, raising his eyebrows in question. She shook her head and touched her throat. "Oh. 'V', then. . . vvv. Yes? Yes, okay then, 'V' it is. . ." She moved her hands away from the rows of characters and looked up at him, expectantly.

"Right, okay - this should be. . . 'tahl-veh'. . . is that right? 'Talve'?"

The woman smiled. Picking up the pad of paper, she touched the top rows of characters, then brushed her fingers across his cheek. Her touch was very soft, and distracted him for a moment, so that she repeated the motion. "Ahh, Dan-Daniel. Daniel. That's me." She caressed the second set of characters, then took Daniel's hand again and held it against her cheek. "Talve. Talve - that's you," he realized. "That's your name. Talve."

The woman - Talve - lit up in the most brilliant smile he'd seen in years. She pressed her cheek into his palm; her breath was warm on his wrist, and when she blinked, a single tear brushed the heel of his hand.

"Talve," he said. "Nice to meet you, Talve - I'm Daniel."

**Author's Note:**

> If you want to leave extra kudos, you're welcome to stop by [my Tumblr blog](http://peaceheather.tumblr.com) and say hello.


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